LEADING folk trio The Unthanks will this weekend present the world premiere of their work based on Emily Brontë’s

poems.

They will perform the Emily Brontë Song Cycle for the first time in front of a live audience at Leeds Town Hall on Friday, December 21.

The work was commissioned by the Haworth-based Brontë Society to mark the 200th birthday year of Emily, author of classic novel Wuthering Heights.

Yorkshire-born Unthanks pianist and composer Adrian McNally has turned a selection of the Yorkshire-born author’s poems into song.

He will perform them at Leeds Town Hall with bandmates and singers Rachel and Becky Unthank.

McNally created the songs using Emily Brontë’s piano, which is still housed in the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, where the writer lived and worked.

A spokesman said: “The only live performance of this new work promises to be an atmospheric and unique collaboration between a literary great and one of the most innovative and critically-acclaimed bands working today.”

The Unthanks are an English folk group known for their eclectic approach in combining traditional English folk, particularly Northumbrian folk music, with other musical genres.

Their debut album Cruel Sister was Mojo magazine’s Folk Album of the Year in 2005. Of their subsequent albums, eight have received four or five-starred reviews in the British national press.

The Unthanks’ album Mount the Air, released in 2015, was voted best album in the 2016 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, and in 2017 they released two albums featuring the songs and poems of Molly Drake, mother of Nick Drake.

The Emily Brontë Song Cycle will also be available as an audio experience for visitors to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth.

From December 17, visitors will be able to borrow equipment from the museum to play the songs through earphones as they walk across the same moors that inspired the Brontë sisters’ writing.

The Emily Bronte Song Cycle features musical versions of 10 poems by the writer of Gothic masterpiece Wuthering Heights.

Call 0113 376 0318 or visit leedstownhall.co.uk to book tickets for the Leeds concert.

Visit bronte.org.uk/whats-on for further information on the audio experience.

The Emily Bronte Song Cycle, funded with support from Arts Council England, will also be available on a record from The Unthanks.