Avowed devotees of early-17th-century Italian music might admire the work of Virgilio Mazzocchi – favoured by successive Barberini and Pamphili popes and an important Roman contemporary of Carissimi – but know little of his older brother Domenico, a musical ecclesiastic employed by the wealthy Aldobrandini family. In later years the elder Mazzocchi was distracted by Etruscan archaeology, but his pastoral opera La catena d’Adone (‘The Chain of Adonis’) was one of the most important early attempts to produce the fledgling genre of opera in Rome. First performed at the Palazzo Conti on February 12, 1626, with mechanically revolving painted backcloths, this favola boscareccia relates the stormy love affairs of Venus, Adonis and the enchantress Falsirena. The work is seemingly frivolous in tone, but the Venetian printed edition of the score claimed it a moral allegory, tenuously comparing the lost Adonis’s unhappy estrangement from Venus to mankind’s sinful distance from a forgiving God.

Documents suggest that La catena d’Adone was accompanied by an orchestra of about 30 musicians, whereas Scherzi Musicali field just eight, a few of whom play more than one instrument; director Nicolas Achten sings three roles and plays archlute, triple harp, harpsichord and spinet – not all of them at once, one assumes. Inserted short sinfonias by Kapsberger are finely played but it would be intriguing to hear the fuller sonority of a much larger instrumental ensemble, especially during Mazzocchi’s scattered ritornellos and choruses. Haute-contre Reinoud Van Mechelen’s top register is impressively sweet in Adone’s first monologue, which expresses his distress and fear of the vengeance of Mars (‘Rapido à par de venti’), and develops into an eloquent arioso with an echo. Falsirena’s several laments in Act 3 that Adonis does not requite her obsessive love are sung emotively by Luciana Mancini, and the incantation scene between the desperate sorceress and unhelpful Pluto in Act 4 is compelling in its supernatural darkness and emotional bitterness. The opera concludes with a charming trio and double-choir paean to Cupid and the reunited Adonis and Venus.