“I thought I'd write to Juliet, for she would understand.” This is the opening line of one of the songs that Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet wrote together for the album The Juliet Letters.

A newspaper article about a professor in Verona who replied to letters addressed to Juliet Capulet, as well as the coincidental meeting of the British songwriter and the string quartet, was all it took to set up this unusual musical collaboration. All 5 musicians contributed to the music and the texts, imagining what the professor had been able to read in those letters – and more importantly: what the answer might have been…

“I once loved someone the way that you do
But I had to let her go
I lived with my regret
Don't despair, my would-be Juliet”

As a counterpart to the sometimes mournfully sarcastic songs, bittersweet a cappella works have been woven throughout the programme, allowing the other face of love to come to the fore.