The two groups behind me who (it emerged at the interval) were all expecting a greatest hits concert by 90s pop duo Shakespears Sister, might have been startled by what they got instead: a Shakespeare-themed song recital. But you can hardly move for lovers and their lasses hey-nonny-no-ing their way across the UK’s concert halls these days, and it takes something extra to set one apart.
Sophie Bevan and pianist Christopher Glynn found it by combining Shakespeare with speeches from actor Harriet Walter’s 2024 book She Speaks! Walter’s wry, often acerbic, occasionally dagger-wielding verse fills in the gaps where women – whether witches, wives, nurses or ingenues – should speak, but don’t. Paired with a brilliantly unexpected selection of Shakespeare songs, many by female composers, it made for more than a simply pretty recital.
We had Desdemona’s Willow, Willow – slinky and bluesy, emotion spilling out over the tightly corseted lute-song framework of Percy Grainger’s bittersweet setting – sung on the brink of her murder. Or, as Walter has it: “I just woke up as you put out my light.” This melted straight into the time-stilling Ave Maria from Verdi’s Otello – a musical mirror in spirit if not style. Bevan carried us across the divide with the immediacy of her delivery, words always leading, before leaping still further to Australian composer Alison Bauld’s daringly sensual Titania’s Song, long phrases spreading wide like limbs, voice arching over pointillist tickles and touches in the piano part.
Ophelia yielded a rich vein of tragic song from Berlioz (his La mort d’Ophelie letting Bevan’s increasingly rich soprano swell) and 20th-century English-Irish composer Elizabeth Maconchy’s lovely lament Ophelia’s Song, and there was lighter respite in Madeleine Dring’s It Was a Lover and Her Lass – only lacking a martini-glass in hand for the full Ivor Novello effect. No Verdi for Lady Macbeth; instead we got Joseph Horovitz’s haunting Lady Macbeth: A Scena, her guilt pulsing through the sleepwalking episode in the obsessive repetitions of the piano part, cruelly emphatic from the responsive Glynn.
Walter herself was originally billed to read, but was replaced by Miranda Richardson – not sufficiently late in the day to justify the muted, celebrity-reader-at-a-charity-carol-service delivery. Still, the pop fans decided to stay on after the interval – and you can’t say fairer than that.
• The Brighton festival continues until 25 May.
