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Michelangelo Rossi.

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Michelangelo Rossi. The Madrigals of Michelangelo Rossi. Edited with an introduction by Brian Mann. (Monuments of Renaissance Music, 10.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, c2002. [Acknowledgments, p. ix; 6 plates; introd. (biography, the madrigals, the sources, bibliography), p. 1-37; crit. commentary, p. 39-53; the edition (editorial principles, transcriptions), p. 55-225; index of compositions, p. 227. Cloth. ISBN 0-226-50338-0. $150.]

Michelangelo Rossi's reputation among twentieth-century scholars and musicians has long rested on his keyboard music collected and published in the volume Toccate e correnti d'intavolatura d'organo e cimbalo sometime in the 1630s in Rome. The daring harmonic language of many of these pieces fostered an early--and lasting--interest in his music, even in times when almost nothing was known about their author. Two toccatas and three correntes, for example, exist in concert arrangements for piano by Bela Bartok (first published in 1930 by Carl Fischer; reissued, along with other arrangements and an introduction by Lazlo Somfai, in XVII and XVIII Century Italian Cembalo and Organ Music Transcribed for Piano [New York: Fischer, 1990]). During his lifetime, Rossi (1601/2-1656) was best known as a virtuoso violinist, hence the nickname Michelangelo del Violino. As a musician at the service of Cardinal Maurizio of Savoy, Taddeo Barberini (Pope Urban VIII's nephew), and Francesco I d'Este, he also wrote a substantial amount of vocal music, including two operas, Erminia sul Giordano (1633) and Andromeda (1638, the music is lost), and two books of unpublished five-voice madrigals, published for the first time in the volume here under review.

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