Sean Shibe

Karim Sulayman, Sean Shibe – Broken Branches (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · December 25, 2023 · Comments off

Karim Sulayman, Sean Shibe - Broken Branches (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz] Download

Programs mixing Eastern and Western materials are common enough, and even those showing the deep interwovenness of East and West, such as those of Jordi Savall, have become more common. Still, it is hard to top this release by tenor Karim Sulayman and guitarist Sean Shibe for sheer ambition. The booklet notes by Olivia Giovetti amplify the idea in a dozen different ways, with extensive reference to Edward Said and to the Arabic ancestry of the guitar, but the basic premise is that “shoehorning things into a forced binary of ‘East’ and ‘West’ eliminates a spectrum of identities more slippery than settled.” Nearly everything here cuts both ways, from a Dowland song accompanied by guitar in the role of the lute (oud), to Sephardic and Arab-Andalusian songs, to a popular song by vocalist Fairuz that draws on Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. One key idea is that musical borrowings are always filtered through the borrower in a kind of imperfect recollection, something explicitly affirmed by Benjamin Britten in connection with his Songs from the Chinese. Many of these strands converge in the Sufi Dance of Jonathan Harvey, a work that the album offers as underrated; listeners will be ready to agree. One might not necessarily choose these players as interpreters of the individual works here, but the album, as a whole, is compelling and thought-provoking.
– James Manheim
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Sean Shibe – Profesión (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · December 2, 2023 · Comments off

Sean Shibe returns to the classical guitar on Profesión, bringing together works by Agustín Barrios, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Alberto Ginastera. The album derives its name from Barrios’s “Profesión de Fe” (profession of faith), a poem which he often used as a preface to his concerts. The poem references indigenous mythological deities, and praises the power of the guitar as the ultimate conduit to the secrets of the divine South-American destiny. Barrios’s La Catedral and Julia Florida are combined with Villa Lobos’s 12 Études, while Ginastera’s Sonata completes the programme. These works by South American composers begin with homage and pastiche in reverence of the Old World, but build towards a totally original idiom – musical magical realism. The repertoire is voluminous, indulging in excess, and narcotic, and as such creates a counterweight to the reserved and introspective nature of Shibe’s acclaimed classical predecessor album Camino. This will be Shibe’s first-ever album focussing on repertoire that was originally written for the classical guitar, and he plays a Hauser copy built for Julian Bream. It was considered one of the best instruments of the 1930s, and fits the sound world of this programme like a glove.

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Sean Shibe & The Choir of King’s College London – Say It to the Still World (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 30, 2023 · Comments off

Multi-award-winning Sean Shibe, widely recognised as the leading guitarist of his generation, joins Delphian regulars The Choir of King’s College London in these beguilingly conceived works by Shibe’s friend and compatriot Lliam Patterson, for the rare combination of choir with electric guitar.

“Say it to the still world” casts Shibe as Orpheus with his lyre, in a work which draws fragments of text from poetry by Rilke to meditate on language, loss and the transcendent power of song. Elegy for Esmeralda is a rawer, angrier response to grief, while poppies spread – composed especially, like the other two works, for the performers who bring it to life here – is a further testament to art’s ability to reflect and transform the outer world.

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Sean Shibe – J.S. Bach: Lute Works (Arr. for Guitar) (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 30, 2023 · Comments off

Three years as a Delphian artist have seen Sean Shibe record music from seventeenth-century Scottish lute manuscripts to twenty-first-century works for electric guitar, picking up multiple editor’s choices and award nominations for each release, as well as the Royal Philharmonic Society’s prestigious ‘Young Artist of the Year’ accolade.

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Sean Shibe – Camino (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 30, 2023 · Comments off

At the heart of Sean Shibe’s album Camino is Catalan composer Federico Mompou’s Suite compostelana, an atmospheric, affectionate homage to Santiago de Compostela, the destination on the famous Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route that winds through northern Spain. But this collection of French and Spanish music also represents a personal journey for the award-winning guitarist, as he sets out afresh with a new record label, Pentatone, and seeks solace from the melancholy and solitude of the pandemic in music he played in his youth. Alongside Mompou, de Falla’s moving tribute to Debussy, Poulenc’s introspective “Sarabande,” Satie piano works deftly arranged for guitar, and Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante d’efunte” all provide comfort and reassurance. It’s beautifully phrased and recorded with equal intimacy.

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Sean Shibe – Lost & Found (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 1, 2022 · Comments off

Sean Shibe’s second PENTATONE album Lost & Found is an ecstatic journey containing music by outsiders, mystics, visionaries, who often have more than one identity and lay claim to various artistic traditions, genres, or audiences. The repertoire ranges from Hildegard von Bingen to Olivier Messiaen, Moondog, Julius Eastman, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Meredith Monk, Shiva Feshareki, Oliver Leith and Daniel Kidane. Stretching ten centuries, these pieces are bound together by Shibe’s unique electric guitar sound and aesthetic.

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