WHEN acclaimed folk band The Unthanks were invited to put Emily Bronte’s verse to music, it was her own piano they used to compose the music.

The result was the Emily Bronte Song Cycle, a moving and atmospheric interpretation of her poetry, which visitors to Haworth’s Bronte Parsonage Museum can listen to on headphones as they make their way around the house and surrounding moors. Commissioned by the Bronte Society, the heritage project was part of a year-long celebration of the bicentenary of Emily’s birth.

Last night the band - Tyneside sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank and Yorkshire pianist/composer Adrian McNally - performed the song cycle at St George’s Hall, and spoke of their work at the Parsonage Museum.

“Being in the Parsonage and in those rooms, the great trees in the churchyard, the crows, those amazing moors...you can’t help but be taken up with the atmosphere,” said Rachel. “We all felt it was a privilege but quite daunting because people take the Brontes to their hearts and have their own relationship with them. When we chose the poems we looked at themes common to folk music - embracing landscape, death and the dark parts of human nature. It felt like familiar territory.”

Adrian said it was a “real privilege” to play Emily’s cabinet piano. He revealed that while working in Haworth the band stayed at Ponden Hall, a house visited by the Brontes and often associated with Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights, which has a replica of Emily’s piano. “They kindly offered to lend it to us for the tour, but our van’s not big enough,” he smiled.

While at the Parsonage, the band recorded sounds - wind howling off the moors, a chiming clock, footsteps, doors opening and the cawing of crows - which accompanied their impressive song cycle concert, encompassing 10 of Emily’s poems, including Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee.

The music is part of an Unthanks trilogy of song cycles inspired by the words of women. Called Lines, it puts to music the work of Emily Bronte, female First World War poets and Hull fishing campaigner Lillian Bilocca.

Rachel’s performance of Teresa Hooley’s powerful poem A War Film was particularly moving: “My little son wondered at bath-time why I kissed him some, How could he know, The sudden terror that assaulted me?...The body I had borne, If, someday it should be taken away, To War. Tortured, Torn. Slain. Rotting in No Man’s Land, out in the rain. My little son.”

The Sea Is a Woman, with lyrics by Maxine Peake, whose play The Last Testament of Lillian Bilocca featured music by the Unthanks, was a haunting tribute to the Hull fishwives who fought for fishing fleet safety following a trawler tragedy.

And we were treated to Molly Drake’s What Can A Song Do To You? and The Testimony Of Patience Kershaw, the heartbreaking testimony of a 17-year-old girl’s work in a Victorian mine.

The quiet beauty and rousing cries of The Unthanks’ music captures a lost past, and extraordinary stories of ordinary people. These songs of women’s work and social history were beautifully performed by the sisters in an intimate staging, accompanied by Adrian on piano. Woven throughout was their wry northern wit. “We’re not exactly known for being chipper,” smiled Rachel.

Support was from the excellent Bookshop Band, who performed their own Emily Bronte tribute; the evocative The Pull of the Moors. The duo, who write and perform songs inspired by books, started as a collaboration between a group of musicians in Bath and their local independent bookshop, Mr B's Emporium.

They tested St George's Hall audience's literary knowledge with a fun quiz, referencing book titles in a song. Lovely stuff.