Sophie Bevan MBE

An intimate Aldeburgh Festival recital unites soprano Sophie Bevan with composer–pianist Ryan Wigglesworth for a concentrated journey through four song cycles for voice and piano. The programme weaves Britten’s The Poet’s Echo, Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, Wigglesworth’s own Till Dawning (after George Herbert), and a closing selection from Britten’s folksong arrangements of Moore’s Irish Melodies. Across approximately 83 minutes of music (105 minutes with interval), it moves from nocturnal anguish and mortality to spiritual clarity and folk-inflected consolation. A distinctive feature is Wigglesworth performing his own work at the keyboard, offering rare composer’s insight in performance. Presented in the Britten Studio at Snape Maltings, this one-off afternoon performance foregrounds text, colour, and intimate musical storytelling.

Miranda Richardson, Golden Globe and BAFTA Award-winning, star of stage and screen (The Hours, Sleepy Hollow, Rita Skeeter in Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire), reads from Harriet Walter’s book, She Speaks! The book imagines – sometimes playfully, sometimes searchingly, but always in Shakespearean verse – what some of the Bard’s most intriguing female characters would have said, if only they’d been given more lines to say. Interspersing readings of Harriet’s own texts with some of the speeches that Shakespeare himself wrote for his women, this evening offers a chance to decide if the greatest writer in the English language was a radical feminist or a sexist pig. Meanwhile leading operatic soprano and concert recitalist Sophie Bevan and Grammy Award-winning pianist Christopher Glynn explore how these same women – mothers and mistresses, saints and sinners, fairies and murderers, witches and wenches – have inspired countless composers down the ages, from Purcell and Haydn through Schubert, Berlioz and Verdi to Bernstein and Madeleine Dring

In the final decade of his life, Mozart composed many of the works that define his legacy today. Settled in Vienna, he began to push at the edges of the Classical style, shaping a direction that would influence composers like Beethoven in the years to come. In this programme, we explore some of Mozart’s latest and greatest works across both the symphonic and operatic repertoire. Joined by Roderick Williams and Sophie Bevan, they perform a selection of arias from The Magic Flute – completed just months before Mozart’s death – and The Marriage of Figaro. Alongside these, we’re also performing the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, Mozart’s longest, largest and last contribution to his symphonic works. Bold and expansive, it paved innovative ways for what a Symphony could be and set a new benchmark for the musical generations that followed.