The Songs of Solomon by Salomone Rossi - Vache Baroque, St John’s Smith Square, London SW1.

4****: Clare Colvin.

“Choreography that flowed through the course of the evening.”

The unusually named Vache Baroque Festival was launched in the teeth of the Pandemic during summer 2020 at the Buckinghamshire house of Vache by a group of young musicians and singers who refused to stop singing on account of a virus. The group has gathered more strength each year and last week presented a 400th “Hanukkah Celebration” of the songs and psalms printed in Venice by the Jewish-Italian composer Salomone Rossi in 1623.

Rossi was a near contemporary of Claudio Monteverdi and had worked with him as a musician in 1607 during Monteverdi’s first opera L’Orfeo. Italy was struggling through a repressive period of counter-reformation, which meant Jewish composers found life more relaxed in states such as Mantua, where princes were keen on culture rather than dogma. Rossi’s creation of using Hebrew text was a way he could bring a Gentile art form to combine in harmony with the music of the psalms in the Hebrew language.

The present group number eight singers - two sopranos Amy Wood and Betty Makharinsky, mezzo soprano Clara Kanter, countertenor and director Jonathan Darbourne, tenors Bradley Smith and Nick Pritchard, baritone Jolyon Loy and bass-baritone Tristan Hambleton. There are also a very solid and individual combination of instrumentalists in the two violins, two theorbos, and one lute, a viola da gamba and an organ/harpsichord. A choreography flowed through the course of the evening, and brought an overall mood of benign contemplation.

Watch out for the next Vache Baroque Festival, with a fully staged production of Pergolesi’s The Olympiad, sung in Italian with adapted English narrative on 31 August, 1, 7, and 8 September 2024. vachebaroque.com