Though she was subsequently sidelined by music history, Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre was a major figure in French music around the turn of the 18th century, and the first French woman to write an opera. She became a member of the court of Louis XIV in her teens, and maintained her royal connections after her marriage, continuing to compose as well as teach. Her output includes keyboard music and sets of secular and biblical cantatas.
Three of the biblical pieces, Susanne and the Elders, Jacob and Rachel, and Judith, each centre on a woman who is the victim of male discrimination and repression; none have been previously performed in the UK. They are brought together in Out of Her Mouth, an hour-long theatre piece directed by Mathilde Lopez, presented as a co-production between the Dunedin Consort, Hera, and Mahogany Opera, and brought to London as part of this year’s Spitalfields festival.
The cantatas themselves are straightforward enough – each relates its biblical tale as a sequence of solo arias separated by short passages of recitative, in an early baroque style. But the perspective of the narrative shifts; sometimes the stories are told in the third person, sometimes the protagonist herself takes over, which gives the production dramatic space to work with. The three sopranos involved, Anna Dennis (as Susanne), Alys Roberts (Rachel) and Carolyn Sampson (Judith), move between singing and spoken narration, either describing what is being shown on stage, or underlining the repression involved, and reinforced by video projections.
The staging itself is minimal and yet it sometimes seems rather contrived. The climax at the end of Judith, when she beheads the general Holofernes as he sleeps in his tent, and involves watermelons and a baseball bat, is almost comically graphic.
The performance uses English texts by Toria Banks, 21st-century paraphrases rather than direct translations of the French originals – “Whisky and cocktails and shots” is one line in Judith. But the words come across clearly enough from the three singers, all of them wonderfully agile and stylish, and dovetailing perfectly with the four-piece ensemble. It all makes a neat musical and dramatic package.
• Further performance at the National Centre for Early Music, York, on 12 July
