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

Metronome, London
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.