The Brodsky Quartet are joined by tenor Daniel Norman and pianist Sholto Kynoch for a special performance of On Wenlock Edge, presented with Jeremy Hamway-Bidgood’s shadow-play film, edited live by the director during the performance.

The programme opens with a set of songs that establishes Vaughan Williams’ pastoral English roots, and its centrepiece is the stunning string quartet by Ravel, with whom Vaughan Williams had been studying immediately before he wrote On Wenlock Edge.

The film is only for On Wenlock Edge, there is no film content for the other repertoire.

A story of love, loss, and learning to let go.

An elderly man, Edward, sits with his dog on a park bench watching the sun set over London’s skyscraper-etched skyline. A sudden storm forces Edward back to his solitary flat and into stormy memories of his youth in the hills of rural Shropshire and the people he once loved and lost.

Based on Ralph Vaughan Williams’ song cycle from 1909 and the poetry of A. E. Housman and told through a visually striking blend of traditional shadow-puppetry and contemporary animation.

We follow Edward as both an old man, nearing the end of his life, and a young man, struggling to fit into the world around him. War, industrialisation, and prejudice pull Edward from the rural idyll of his youth into his self-imposed urban isolation.

Wracked by guilt, shame, and heartbreak he must retrace his footsteps to find the peace he craves.