Catherine Bott/Schubert Ensemble, Wilton's Music Hall / Christ Church, Spitalfields, London

A cycle of paradox from Austen to Coward

Hawksmoor's imposing Baroque Christ Church is itself among the primary reasons to go to either of Spitalfields' two music festivals. Yet neither next Christmas's nor next summer's events will be held there, due to work on the next stages of much-needed renovation.Both festivals' new artistic director, the composer Jonathan Dove, and long-time manager, Judith Serota, are already exploring some alternative venues during the 26th summer celebrations, allowing the programming of music that wouldn't work in Christ Church itself. My first visit this year was accordingly to the splendidly dilapidated Wilton's Music Hall further south.

The soprano Catherine Bott has been chiefly known as a singer of Baroque music in "authentic" mode. In the first of two recitals on the same evening, however, she chose Purcell as arranged by Britten, and some Haydn and Walton songs. With vivid piano accompaniment from Andrew West, all was delivered in a style still notable for its purity and flexibility, yet allowing a wider range of timbres and phrasings than "period" correctness generally implies. The first public performance of Dove's own Five Am'rous Sighs revealed a paradox: 18th-century poems of surprisingly modern sensibility set to music that blandly pined for musical certainties already undermined at least a century before these songs were written.

In the second recital, Bott moved to cabaret territory completely new to her but perfect for the venue. It was a risk decidedly worth the taking, since everything about this one-hour show, from its carefully researched contents (including little-known Joyce Grenfell and familiar Noel Coward) to Bott's highly intelligent singing and acting – and the supple subtlety of Dove's own piano accompaniment – was sheer delight. Here, Dove also provided The Beautifull [sic] Cassandra, a spoken sequence with piano based on Jane Austen's juvenilia, demonstrating what a clever composer he is of this sort of thing, unencumbered by the expectations of art song.

As a festival director, Dove is already proving stimulating too; an apposite focus, given Spitalfields' history, on Jewish music this year is but one imaginative strand. As to how he spends the commissioning fund laudably set up by his predecessor, Judith Weir, the jury must remain out for the moment. But Cheryl Frances-Hoad's Memoria, premiered by the oboist Nicholas Daniel and three strings and piano from the Schubert Ensemble, proved a skilfully written, if at times rather insistently overwrought, 15-minute piece. At only 22, Frances-Hoad already demonstrates that he has considerable potential.

The festival continues to 28 June (020-7377 1362)