Musique judeo-baroque (1988)

This record, made in the USA but issued by a French company, has the title "Musique Judeo Baroque". It assembles three seventeenth-century works written for Jewish ceremonial; only one of them is liturgical, or para-liturgical, for the use of music within the ritual of the synagogue has always been very restricted at least as far as the admission of contemporary secular idioms is concerned. The three works differ widely in style. The longest is Salomone Rossi'sa group of pieces from his 1622 publication Shi rim Asher Li'Shlomo, in which traditional Hebrew prayers are set in a rather conservative but finely-wrought Palestrina-like, imitative style; on this disc they are interspersed with instrumental movements in a more modern, early Baroque manner, one or two of them containing vivid, rhetorical writing but for the most part infused with a grave, restrained beauty. (...) all this makes the disc well worth trying for anyone inquisitive about this little tributary of seventeenth-century musical history.

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