Made in Italy: Renaissance and Baroque Music (Palestrina – Gesualdo – Monteverdi – Rossi)

Our concert focuses on the period of transition from Renaissance to baroque music in Italy and features works by two of the towering figures, Monteverdi, with a dramatic setting of a sonnet by Petrarch, and Palestrina, with his Missa Brevis, a glory of Renaissance church music. Our exploration of this period ventures into the less well known world of the so-called ‘Prince of Darkness’, Carlo Gesualdo, whose eccentric harmonies even today sound ‘modern’, and the relatively unknown Salomone Rossi, whose settings of two psalms in the western polyphonic style allowed the well-established Jewish community to break with tradition and sing their Hebrew liturgy in the contemporary Italian custom.