This programme includes music from Schubert, Vaughan Williams, Haydn, Verdi, Purcell and more (full programme below)

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