Brother Tree Sound

Brother Tree Sound are playing The Small Chapel at the JdP Music Building on Tuesday 27 October, with two performances on the one day: 4:30pm and 7:00pm. It's a programme built around British folk music, and the two main pieces are Holst's Phantasy Quartet on British Folksongs, op. 36 from 1916 and Vaughan Williams' String Quartet No. 1 in G minor, written between 1908 and 1909 and revised in 1921. Alongside those, they'll play their own transcriptions of folksongs from England, Ireland and Wales.

Brother Tree Sound is a string quartet formed in 2017 around Anna de Bruin, Thea Spiers, Edward Keenan and Eve Littlefair. They describe themselves as devoted to new music and folk alongside the core classical quartet repertoire, and that's a good summary of what they've put out so far. They've released four albums, gathered over 10 million streams worldwide, and sold out their debut at Kings Place in London. Their discography runs from Hope Spiral, a Ben Nobuto commission on NMC, to an album of early 20th-century French quartets by Ravel, Tailleferre, Milhaud and Durey on First Hand, the folk album Maid on the Shore, and Songs Without Words in 2022. They regularly commission new work, and were chosen to lead the main composition workshop at the Royal Musical Association conference at Oxford University's Schwartzman Centre Building.

This is the first of two concerts they're giving this year. The second, which focuses on contemporary British music written about a century later, takes place in January. Tickets are £20, and doors open 20 minutes before each performance. The venue is The Small Chapel in the JdP Music Building, St Hilda's College, Cowley Place, Oxford, OX4 1DY.