From Venice to Florence on the Elbe: The Songs of Solomon Rediscovered

Venice around 1610: a city full of languages, where Jewish cantors and German travellers meet – and imitate one another. Here, in 1623, Salamone Rossi’s “Songs of Solomon” appears: Hebrew liturgy in the artistic language of Italian polyphony, where for centuries a single voice had been enough. Le Bois Chantant, a Berlin ensemble for vocal Renaissance improvisation, does not simply perform these settings but goes on inventing them – without a score, following historical rule books out of which music of the present arises. Alberto de Campo’s Polyharpye answers with microtonal resonances that can bring any improvisation to the brink of collapse: a game played with the wind. Alongside them, Banchieri’s caricatures of a boat trip to Padua and Sermisy’s chanson “Je ne menge point de porc”. The sound of the Serenissima, four hundred years on – how it will sound nobody knows beforehand, not even the singers.