In the Belly of the Beast review – biblical events showcase Sun King’s favoured composer

Spitalfields music festival opened, by chance, with this beautifully performed and dramatic revival of baroque cantatas by Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre

With temperatures at Shoreditch Town Hall reaching a sweltering 41 degrees, Spitalfields music festival was forced to cancel the first event of its 50th anniversary season. As a result, this concert of rare baroque cantatas, simply staged and stylishly sung, was the inadvertent festival opener.

Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre was quite a player at the court of Louis XIV. Singled out by the Sun King aged five, she went on to become the first French woman to write an opera, and her works were both published and widely performed. Alongside her keyboard music, she’s best known today for her two sets of biblical cantatas. Musically straightforward, they follow the recitative and aria pattern of the day. What makes them fertile ground from a dramatic perspective, however, is the way the storytelling flips back and forth from third-person narrative to the protagonist – or in one case protagonists – of the tale.

This co-production between the Dunedin Consort, Hera and Mahogany Opera presented three of them: Adam, Jonah and Jephthah. Collectively entitled In the Belly of the Beast, in Toria Banks’s loose English translations the obvious villain here was the dictatorial God of the Old Testament. In Adam, the divinity seemed inordinately keen on receiving full credit for his handiwork, taking pleasure in setting a trap for his human creation (seen through a feminist lens it’s noteworthy that Antoine Houdar de la Motte’s text for Jacquet de La Guerre never once mentions Eve). The hapless Jonah was scapegoated to teach him God’s lesson, while Jephthah’s daughter was not only a victim of her overbearing father but prey to a remorseless deity who, in this version, sent no angel of mercy as a last-minute reprieve.

Jennifer Fletcher’s modest but effective staging was sensitively accompanied on theorbo, viola da gamba and violin, with Carolyn Sampson and Mariana Rodrigues theatrically persuasive across the three cantatas. In Adam, a canny Sampson proved adept at highlighting the irony in Banks’s subversive libretto, with Rodrigues warmly affecting as she went to her death as Jephthah’s daughter. Both sang elegantly and with tonal beauty, their agile voices combining in exhilarating roulades in the final cantata.

• Spitalfields music festival runs at various venues until 8 July
• In the Belly of the Beast tours until 4 July