San Francisco Classical Voice

"How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" asks the psalmist, but for the San Francisco Bach Choir it might be rephrased: "How can we sing the Lord's song in an unfamiliar tongue?" An unusual program of works in Hebrew for multiple choirs by the 17th century composer Salamone Rossi (1570--c.1630) was presented by the San Francisco Bach Choir at San Francisco's First Unitarian Church on Saturday.

Rossi was part of a flourishing Italian-Jewish community in the Italian city of Mantua with close musical association to the court of the Gonzaga family. While this was a rare instance of late Renaissance music for the Jewish liturgy, only the language separated its musical style from works of Gabrieli, Monteverdi, and other Venetian polychoral writers of this period. With expectations of the exotic or novel, we listen in vain for evidence of cantillation, Jewish chant, or departures from the harmonies of the common Western practice. This is a musical style which is fully assimilated.

The repertoire was a sampling from the voluminous collection wittily titled "The Songs of Solomon" ("Hashirim asher lish'lomo") published in 1622-23 by Leo da Modena, Rossi's pupil and founder of a Jewish musical academy in Venice. This collection of Hebrew psalms, hymns, and other liturgical music is a pun: literally, "the songs of Salomone (Rossi)," as it contains nothing from the Old Testament book of love poetry.

Conductor David Babbitt chose a program to capitalize on the spacious interior of the Unitarian church, alternating massive choral psalm settings with instrumental interludes of trio sonatas played on period instruments. Conducting with a luminous blue wand (a bit reminiscent of the radioactive ingot wielded by Homer Simpson), Babbitt coordinated choirs in the gallery, both side aisles, and the front of the resonant church.

The impressive Psalm 112 enveloped the audience from three sides with an evenly balanced and pliant sound, whose constantly shifting textures animated the thick harmonies. The rhythmic vitality of the "Q'dusha" sung by eleven singers, gave glimpses of Rossi the madrigalist; the clarity of the diction and interplay of lines was outstanding. This a cappella performance persuasively supports the rabbinical prohibition against instrumental accompaniment in the synagogue.

Despite the stylish phrasing of John Dornenburg, violone, with cellist Farley Pearce and organist Steven Bailey, the omnipresent continuo group gave an earthbound density to the textures, and an unwelcome favoring of the chordal harmony to the detriment of the interplay of lines.

The instrumentalists fared better when playing alone. Three trio sonatas, with violinists David Wilson and Heidi Wilcox, demonstrated Rossi's facility with virtuosic writing and inventive variation and gave the audience refreshing interludes between the choral groups. The dance variations on the "Aria di Tordiglione" were a playful display of violinistic one-upmanship between Wilson and Wilcox.

The second half of the concert resembled an Orthodox temple in reverse--with the men now in the gallery, separated from the women. The performance by the men of Psalm 137, "By the Waters of Babylon," conducted by Frazier Stevenson, was expressive and striking. Though Rossi rarely resorts to text-painting, the line "Sing us one of the songs of Zion" was emphatically declaimed. The women's response, Psalm 126, was angelically blended and tuned, but too limpid in energy for the text of "sowing in tears and reaping with joy."

The sound of the choir was thrilling in the large polychoral pieces, though intonation was compromised at times by spatial separation from the continuo. The singers focused attentively on Babbitt, who managed the complex coordination with the security of an Italian cop at a five-way intersection. Too often, however, he allowed the accumulating energy to diffuse at phrase ends, often punctuated by tell-tale Hebrew consonants.

David Babbitt's programming was masterful in demonstrating the variety of works produced by a single composer. However, perhaps obliging the needs of 80 dedicated volunteers, he missed opportunities to use soloists or "favoriti," which would have varied the choral color and made the massed-choir pieces all the more impressive. The three-part Call to Prayer was a likely candidate for such soloistic treatment. It's doubtful that even Sgr. Rossi ever heard this much of his music performed in a single evening by such numbers. The continuously regrouping of forces between pieces also became distracting and at times inexplicable, as double-choir pieces were performed by four choirs.

Special mention must be made of the unusual printed program, a typographical tour-de-force prepared by Debra Gelber and Avi Pfeffer, with the transliteration and English translation flanking the original text in Hebrew. The Bach Choir and Babbitt are to be commended for widening their (and our)musical horizons with this excursion into this rarely performed repertoire; there's a reassuring familiarity to it all, a reminder of a brief but peaceful coexistence of Christian and Jewish culture, ended by the destruction of the ghetto during the sack of Mantua by Ferdinand II of Prussia, and the subsequent plague which took the life of Rossi in 1630.

(Bruce Lamott is choral director of the Philharmonia Chorale and the Carmel Bach Festival. He is also an instructor in music and Western Civilization at San Francisco University, and conducts choral classes in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Extension Program.)

©1998 Bruce Lamott, all rights reserved