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W<\/span>ith 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.<\/p>\n \u00c9lisabeth 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 or in one case protagonists \u2013 of the tale.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s noteworthy that Antoine Houdar de la Motte\u2019s text for Jacquet de La Guerre never once mentions Eve). The hapless Jonah was scapegoated to teach him God\u2019s lesson, while Jephthah\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n