Benedetto Ferrari has earned his place in the history books by being credited with introducing opera to Venice, and so inaugurating the tradition of ‘public’ as opposed to ‘court’ opera. His own music has received rather less attention, and so it is very good indeed to have this imaginative choice of pieces, including some songs from the third book of Musiche varie (1642) and a complete oratorio, Il Sansone, written 38 years later. The one piece here that everyone will know is the duet ‘Pur ti miro’, which ends Monteverdi’s Poppea but, as Alan Curtis has shown, was almost certainly written by Ferrari as the last number of Il pastor reggio for which the music is lost. Here it is given an engagingly seductive reading by Roberta Invernizzi and Elena Cecchi Fedi, gently underpinned by a spare continuo grouping of theorbo and harpsichord.
Like so many 17th-century Italian oratorios, the libretto of Il Sansone is based on the Bible, in this case the well-known episode of Samson’s weakness in the face of Delilah’s charms. This places it firmly in the category of the ‘oratorio erotico’, which admitted scenes and musical language more familiar from the opera house than the oratory. One of the revelations of Il Sansone is the ingenuity with which different characters and moods are so successfully delineated by Ferrari; this is as true of the moralising allegorical figures of Reason and Passion as it is of the two central protaganists. In the end it is the fine performances of Carlo Lepore’s authoritative, though ultimately weak, Samson, and Roberta Invernizzi’s sexily teasing Delilah that carry this forgotten minor masterpiece across the hypothetical footlights.'