A decade or so ago, the French composer Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre was barely a historical footnote; today, she’s beginning to attract attention, but live performances remain few and far between. It’s all a far cry from the status she enjoyed in France at the turn of the 18th Century: Louis XIV made her a court musician at Versailles, and she was the first woman to have an opera performed at the Paris Opera.
London is unlikely to see her operas any time soon, but with this welcome Spitalfields Festival show (for one night only, unfortunately), the avowedly feminist opera company Hera offered staged presentations of three of Jacquet’s cantatas.
Jacquet based each piece on an Old Testament story with a woman at its centre; director Mathilde Lopez refashioned them into an extended 21st-century parable, entitled Out of her Mouth. The sung content, newly translated by Toria Banks, presented Susanna, Judith and Rachel as warriors fighting against the patriarchy, using the United Nations’ 1967 Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women as a guiding text.
This was shoestring production and gig venue Village Underground is hardly a theatre, so props were minimal: a chair, a table, everyday costumes, projections on the back wall and not a lot else. But if the stage layout was bare-bones basic, the musical resources was anything but: the “orchestra” consisted of four unnamed players from Dunedin Consort, one of our leading baroque ensembles, while the singers taking the title role in each cantata were sopranos of the highest calibre: Anna Dennis, Alys Roberts and Carolyn Sampson.
The show began with a spoken commentary on what we were seeing, the words simultaneously projected onto the back wall. Meanwhile, Rachel (Alys Mererid Roberts) carried watermelons onto the stage; their significance would be revealed at the end of evening. The texts’ relationship to the original biblical story was tangential but not arbitrary: Susannah (Anna Dennis) looked back at her younger self from the perspective of a mature women still enjoying the torment of sexual desire; Rachel became a bargaining chip in an arranged marriage; Judith (Carolyn Sampson) beheaded a rapacious Holofernes by cheerfully battering watermelons with a baseball bat.
Tendentious? You bet, but musical values were high. The three soloists sang with idiomatic stylishness, each fully inhabiting their role: there was a comic book glee in Sampson’s wielding of the baseball bat, and at one point it looked as if she might inflict serious damage on the violinist. The playing of Dunedin Consort, meanwhile, was flexible, always alert to the dramatic moment. Old Testament scholars and Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre might have been surprised by what we were seeing, but it had its own integrity.
