Philharmonia Baroque Highlights Salamone Rossi

Last night the Philharmonic Baroque Orchestra & Chorale presented the latest installment in its Jews & Music series of performances. The objective of this series was provided in the program book by a single (albeit longwinded) sentence: “Jews & Music (JAM) is a continuous exploration that probes the rich legacies of Jewish composers and performers; non-Jews who worked with Jews or drew inspiration from them; the socio-political milieu they inhabited; and Jewish themes that have emerged across music and visual art over time.” This particular installment focused on the Jewish composer Salamone Rossi, a contemporary of Claudio Monteverdi, included on the program through two selections that provided a compare-and-contrast opportunity.

Most of the selections on the program were vocal, performed by an octet of members of the Philharmonia Chorale, prepared under the direction of Valérie Sainte-Agathe. The group consisted of pairs of sopranos (Michele Kennedy and Helene Zindarsian), altos (Laurel Cameron Porter and Kyle Tingzon), tenors (Jeff Howe and Benjamin Liupaogo), and basses (Joel Chapman and Jim Monios); and the sang in different groupings based on the requirements of the music. Richard Egarr conducted from behind his harpsichord; and the other instrumentalists, when necessary, were violinists Isabelle Seula Lee and Carla Moore, William Skeen on cello, and Kevin Payne on theorbo.

The performance took place in The Green Room of the Veterans Building, a massive space intended for large entertainment events, which could not have been more unsuitable for the intimacy of the music being performed. On the bright side, the audience provided a full house, which should be at least partial compensation for all that was lacking in the acoustics. Less bright was the participation of Scholar in Residence Francesco Spagnolo, who delivered his thoughts on the program as if he had never before used a microphone; and, in the hostile acoustics of The Green Room, that meant that much of what he had to say came across as little more than mush.

The good news is that the music did not require amplification, and there was crystal clarity in the delivery of all of the participating musicians and vocalists. Spagnolo spent more time talking about Venice than about the music, meaning that the music could speak for itself. Ironically, this seems to have been my first encounter with Rossi’s music since the Voices of Music “holiday season” concert in December of 2016; and my only contact with recordings took place during my Examiner.com tenure. Thus, whatever annoyances may have arisen over the course of the evening, the performance of the music itself was decidedly (as P. T. Barnum would have put it) “worth the price of admission!”