Forbidden Music of Salamone Rossi

This concert is partially underwritten by: Leonard & Irene Bettinger Philanthropic Fund at the Jewish Community Foundation, Shalon Fund, and Louis & Frances Swinken Supporting Foundation of the Jewish Community Foundation

Salamone Rossi was a composer ahead of his time, navigating two worlds that rarely intersected. As a celebrated Jewish musician at the Gonzaga court in Renaissance Italy, he composed elegant madrigals and instrumental works alongside figures such as Claudio Monteverdi, writing in the same musical language that shaped late Renaissance and early Baroque sacred music. Yet within his own community, Jewish worship remained rooted in monophonic chant, preserving a centuries-​old liturgical tradition.

Rossi’s Ha-​Shirim Asher li-​Shlomo (The Songs of Solomon) was revolutionary, introducing polyphony into Hebrew sacred music for the first time. While composers like Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina had long refined polyphony for Christian worship, its use in the synagogue was uncharted and controversial. Rossi’s sacred Hebrew works, though refined and deeply learned, unsettled traditions that had safeguarded Jewish identity through centuries of diaspora. As a result, his music was rarely performed and nearly lost to history.

This concert places Rossi’s music in its full historical and artistic context. Alongside his Hebrew polyphonic settings, the program weaves in music by contemporaries Monteverdi and Palestrina, as well as modern Jewish choral works, tracing a living tradition shaped by encounter, tension, and renewal. The result is a portrait of a composer and a culture at the threshold of transformation.