Bach’s lute music, won our Disc of the Year award. His 2020 album BACH, featuring brilliantly idiomatic guitar realisations of J.S.
In repertoire ranging from John Dowland to Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint and Julia Wolfe’s LAD, by way of Britten, Lennox Berkeley and Malcolm Arnold, he has demonstrated not only prodigious technical capabilities but also a deep musicality, evident both in his playing and in his compellingly structured programmes.
Since his first solo disc for the Delphian label, Dreams & Fancies in 2017, Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe has established a reputation as one of the most sensitive and imaginative musicians on the scene today. Camino is the first fruit of an exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE. Multi-award-winning guitarist Sean Shibe brings a fresh and innovative approach to the traditional classical guitar, while also exploring contemporary music and repertoire for electric guitar. In that respect, Camino also documents Shibe’s personal quest to overcome the challenges of a time dominated by Covid-19, and to ultimately see the world anew. Shibe has deliberately granted Mompou a central role on this album, as his music demonstrates that melancholy, aimlessness and a whole host of other feelings are not things to be avoided or fixed or solved, but experiences to be felt deeply: not with sad nostalgia, but with genuine wonder and excitement at what this means for the future. Philippe Jaroussky and Thibaut Garcia are incomparable singers, attentive to the slightest inflection of the pieces they perform, in a true fusion of words and notes.Camino is guitarist Sean Shibe’s first PENTATONE album, an introspective programme exploring French-Spanish musical borders, a pilgrimage leading from Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante défunte, Satie’s Gymnopédie no.1 and Gnossiennes 1 and 3, Poulenc’s Sarabande, De Falla’s Miller’s Dance and Homaje, pour le Tombeau de Debussy and José’s Pavana triste all the way to Mompou’s Canços i dansas 6 and 10, as well as his Suite compostelana. These two accomplices take us on a vast exploration of melody, from the subtleties of the English masters (Dowland with the sublime melancholy of In darkness let me dwell and Purcell of course with the tragic Dido's lament, but also Britten, their direct heir, with the very rare Il est quelqu'un sur terre) to the dramatic Erlkönig by Schubert, from Mozart's crepuscular Abendempfindung to the Iberian fulgurances of Granados' Amor y odio, el mirar de la maja, not forgetting the typically French refinement of a triptych devoted to Fauré ( Au bord de l'eau, Nocturne, Les berceaux), not forgetting, of course, Poulenc's À sa guitare, a melody that gives its title to this evening's programme and in which the composer pays homage to Ronsard's genius. This is the case of Thibaut Garcia, a young star already in the firmament, worthy partner of Philippe Jaroussky whose vocal beauty and imperial singing line need no further praise. This requires a virtuoso capable of both sonic opulence and impalpable atmospheres. The guitar, and with it its ancestors the lute or theorbo, wove learned textures around the voice, creating atmospheres that were sometimes lunar and sometimes popular (that's the paradox of this instrument), doing justice to the beauty of the texts set to music.
But this is to forget that other strings - plucked strings this time - reigned majestically in the aristocratic salons. When we think of melody, the sounds of the piano immediately spring to mind.