Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe has spent his career pushing the classical guitar into bold new territory, greatly expanding its sound world and expressive reach. Vespers, his new recording on Pentatone, presents compelling first recordings of works by the British composers Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, and James Dillon.
Forgotten Dances, Adès’s newly written dance suite for solo guitar, is his first published solo work for an instrument other than keyboard. Each movement of Forgotten Dances refers to traditional musical forms as well as historical, literary, or painterly precedents. Adès says of the dances, “We don’t know the steps anymore, but they are somehow contained in the DNA of the music.”
The first movement, “Overture, Queen of the Spiders,” fuses two images: the majestic overture that begins many Baroque suites and a spiderweb, which Adès compares to the fretboard on a guitar. It uses the grand gestures, elaborate ornamentation, and contrasting tempos of a Baroque overture to illustrate the inexorable movements of a spider capturing a fly.
The second movement, “Berceuse, The Paradise of Thebes,” uses the traditional lullaby form to conjure a drug induced state associated with Thebes in ancient Egypt. It rocks in a slow but unstable duple meter, with the melody blurred by slides, tremolandos, and trills.
In the spectacular “Courante - Here was a swift (for Max Ernst)” Adès uses a Baroque dance with running and jumping steps, a surrealist painting by Max Ernst, and a reference to the swift, a fast-flying species of bird. He writes, “When I think of that particular bird, the swift, it’s unbelievably fast, the fastest thing in the world. But it’s also a little bundle of feathers and bones. A real thing, just as the guitar is, but it looks like something that’s made of air.” Shibe points out the piece includes a “sense of gravity grounded by the smack of the fingers on the strings.”
The traditional barcarolle is a song associated with Venetian gondoliers and characterized by a rhythm reminiscent of the gondolier pushing his boat. Adès’s “Barcarolle - The Maiden Voyage” is a sentimental evocation of a trip his grandmother took at age fifteen on the ocean liner Queen Mary.
The fifth movement, “Carillon de Ville (for Hector Berlioz),” starts quietly with the guitar’s beautiful harmonics. The texture becomes inexorably more complex and almost miraculously evokes the cacophonous tintinnabulation of the bells at the end of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. The final movement “Vesper (for Henry Purcell)” uses the repeated ground bass pattern from Purcell’s “An Evening Hymn” and pays homage to the original with his own evocative embellishments.
Shibe performs an encore of sorts with the inclusion of Adès’s short Habanera, derived from his opera, The Exterminating Angel. The opera includes an aria for mezzo-soprano, guitar, and ondes Martenot, which Adès adapted to create a vividly grotesque solo guitar piece for Shibe.
Harrison Birtwistle is a composer whose music, with its wandering melodies and enigmatic expressivity, often sounds primal and ritualistic. Beyond the White Hand: Construction with Guitar Player is a major work of over 18 minutes which takes as an inspiration a sculpture of a guitar made by Pablo Picasso as well as an earlier Birtwistle work, Guitar and White Hand. This music by Birtwistle is supplemented by five intriguing miniatures, two written for his son and three transcribed for guitar by Forbes Henderson from piano originals.
The 12 Caprices by James Dillon are true miniatures, each unique in character. The first Caprice, for example, should be played with genuine nervousness, while the seventh should be nonchalant and carefree. Each explores a different acoustical effect: chords arpeggiated or plucked, dark sounds versus bright; contrapuntal textures versus sensuous chords. Dillon is well known for his large-scale compositional projects that take many years to complete. It is fascinating to hear him explore his musical interests in miniature.
The album is accompanied by fascinating liner notes by Hugh Morris and Jonathan Leathwood which give a great deal of historical, analytical and anecdotal context. Sean Shibe’s Vespers is a breathtaking compilation of some of the most innovative music written for guitar this century.
