New York Baroque, Eric Milnes - Rossi: The Songs of Solomon, Volumes I & II (1997)

Salomone Rossi (1570-1630) was the most famous Jewish musician and composer of the Italian Renaissance. He was a court musician in the city of Mantua and enjoyed special privileges, for example, he was allowed not to wear the yellow "Jewish" patch on his clothes, mandatory for other Jews.
In addition to secular music (sonatas, madrigals), he was also the author of a collection of sacred Jewish music. It must be said that after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans (70 AD), the Jewish tradition forbade the use of musical instruments in the synagogue as a sign of mourning, and liturgical singing was monophonic. S. Rossi was the first to decisively change this principle, but this happened only with the permission of the rabbinical court held in Venice.
The title of the cycle "Songs of Solomon" (published in 1623) contains a play on words regarding the name of the biblical character and the name of the author. There is nothing Jewish in the musical sense, and here one can understand the composer, who saw the problematic combination of a specific oriental modality with its free rhythm and tendency to improvise with the modern technique of European polyphony. In each part of the cycle, a madrigal-style choir of three to eight voices participates, the texts consist of psalms, hymns and prayers (Igdal, Adon Olyam, Kaddish, Barhu, etc.). The first half of the cycle consists of compositions for the service on Shabbat, in the second part – for other holidays.
Salomone Rossi supposedly died during the capture of Mantua by external enemies. The Jewish community (about two thousand people) was expelled from the city, after which the composer's musical legacy was forgotten for a long time.