Founded by four ambitious teenagers in Middlesbrough in 1972, the Brodsky Quartet’s extraordinary fifty-year career has encompassed collaborations with musicians including Sting, Björk and Sir Paul McCartney as well as a whole host of superb recordings of core repertoire from Mozart to Bartók.

It was a great pleasure to be joined by cellist and founder-member Jacqueline Thomas and her husband Paul Cassidy (who became the quartet’s viola-player in the early 1980s) for a whistle-stop tour through the group’s first five decades, not least because the pair had such a profound direct influence on my own development as a young musician growing up in Middlesbrough during the 1990s – in between touring with Elvis Costello and recording a landmark cycle of the Shostakovich quartets, they regularly carved out time to return to the area to coach aspiring chamber-groups and perform concertos with local amateur orchestras, experiences which will stay with me for life.  

Join us for a trip down memory-lane, taking in their early days feverishly transcribing Janáček and Shostakovich direct from radio-broadcasts, game-changing encounters with Japanese designer Issey Miyake, Costello and *Line of Duty* star Adrian Dunbar, and the process of documenting the quartet's history in their recently-published twin autobiographies...

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