The subtitle of this recording is an explicit reference to Rossi’s social and professional position as an early seventeenth-century Jewish composer and instrumentalist who was dependant upon Christian support of various kinds, whether from Gonzagas Dukes or Venetian publishers, notwithstanding his income from his own ensemble and from working with Jewish theatrical troupes in Northern Italy. These ambiguities and tensions (surely real from what is known of the conditions of Italian Jewry of the period) are also reflected in his music; while to most of his contemporaries he was best known as a composer of madrigals and instrumental music, he also earns a place in the history books as the first composer to publish polyphonic settings of texts (psalms, hymns and synagogal songs) from the Jewish liturgy. In practice the style of these pieces (three of them are presented on this record, one, somewhat perversely, in an instrumental performance) differs little from the general idiom of his madrigals, a light, sonorous style that breathes the freshness of the pastoral Marenzio and the early Monteverdi.
Six madrigals are also given here, often in heavily and inadmissibly readjusted and ‘over-orchestrated’ versions (Rimanti in pace, which substitutes instruments for vocal lines in places, is a particularly serious offender). Ensemble is clean enough and pitching accurate, but the overall sound is polite, disengaged and mannered, with the vowels doing all the work and the consonants largely absent; most Italians would have a hard task recognizing this as their native language. On the other hand the instrumental performances are far more successful (the Sinfonia grave, beautifully shaped and phrased, is particularly effective), and it is here that Rossi can be heard at his most novel and prophetic.'