Concert: Interfaith Exchanges in the Music of Baroque Italy

From Ghetto to Cappella: Interfaith Exchanges in the Music of Baroque Italy. Presented by The Temple Emanu-El Skirball Center in partnership with NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò. This event is part of La Serenissima: Music and Arts from the Venetian Republic, a citywide celebration of Venice organized by Carnegie Hall (February 3 – 21).

Performed by:
Jessica Gould, Soprano
Noa Frenkel, Contralto
Davide Pozzi, Harpsichord
James Waldo, Viola da Gamba
Diego Cantalupi, Lute
Members of L’Aura Soave Cremona

TICKETS START AT $25. Click here for puchase.

The early-music series Salon/Sanctuary Concerts offers a program of unaccompanied Hebrew chants and music, illustrating a vibrant dialogue during a time of great oppression—a cross-fertilization of musical ideas and cultures between Venice’s Jews and Catholics that traversed the forbidding walls of the city’s Jewish ghetto.

While the Inquisition raged throughout Counter-Reformation Italy, the ghetto walls that separated Gentile from Jew were more porous than impenetrable. In commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the creation of the first Jewish Ghetto in Venice, we explore the cross-fertilization of Jewish and Catholic musical cultures that enriched the music of both synagogue and sanctuary. Works of Benedetto Marcello, Francesco Durante, Barbara Strozzi, Salomone Rossi, and unaccompanied Hebrew chants attest to a lively conversation, as do selections from the 1759 Hebrew libretto of Handel’s Esther, commissioned by the Jewish community of Amsterdam in the year of the composer’s death.

From Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò.