Songs of Salamon Rossi

The San Francisco Bach Choir, under the direction of David Babbitt, opens its 63nd season with an unusual concert featuring late Renaissance works by Salamon Rossi, the great Italian-Jewish composer from Mantua. This first program in an entire season of music for multiple choirs will highlight the choir’s antiphonal presentation format with works for two, three and four large ensembles singing from various positions around the hall. Two venues chosen specifically for their fine acoustical properties—San Francisco’s First Unitarian Center and Oakland’s Temple Sinai—will set off this early form of stereophonic sound, a specialty of the choir that grew from its quest to revive long-forgotten choral repertoire from the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

The concert focuses on Rossi’s magnificent polychoral prayer settings sung in Hebrew and buoyantly clothed in Renaissance style—music that is drawn from a period in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries when the golden age of humanism swept over Italy and when Italian-Jewish communities briefly became active participants in the great flowering of the late Renaissance culture, contributing music to the major courts which broke from the synagogue chant traditions of their time. The choir will be joined by an ensemble of early strings with a baroque pipe organ for this performance and additional sets of instrumental dance music will round out the program.