Lost & Found
Sean Shibe (electric guitar)
rec. 2021/22, Lost Oscillation Studios, Edinburgh, UK
Reviewed as a digital download from a press preview
PENTATONE PTC5186988 [70]
I doubt there is a more daring or versatile musician recording
today than Sean Shibe. There is an art to putting together an effective
programme that not every musician has mastered and many would be better
off sticking to more traditional formulas. When a musician gets the
formula right, as Shibe does on this new recital disc, the results transcend
the individual pieces included to create almost a new work. In this
instance, they add up to a vision which is Shibe’s.
Vision is very much the appropriate word for this disc since the thread
that connects the pieces, however loosely, is a preoccupation with the
meditative and the spiritual. The uncanny arrangement of Hildegard of
Bingen’s O Viridissima Virga, which gets us under way,
sounds for all the world like electronica and alerts us straightaway
that this is Shibe using his electric guitars (and a profusion of pedals).
Shibe’s magnificent double album Loud Soft gave us music for both
the acoustic and electric versions of his instrument but this is his
first exclusively plugged in.
As if to avoid frightening off more traditional listeners the next track,
one of several of Chick Corea’s Children’s Songs
included, shows Shibe in melodious Pat Metheny mode. Throughout Shibe
seems concerned with demonstrating the musical range of the
electric guitar beyond rocking out. Though it has to be said he does
just that on Sea Horse the first of a handful of pieces by
the maverick composer Moondog who spent a lot of his life homeless and
dressed as Viking. Those familiar with his compositions will already
know that they are much more conventional than his lifestyle.
The collection is seasoned with a clutch of contemporary compositions:
the first of which is a brittle, glinting piece from Daniel Kidane that
seeks to find comfort in response to lockdown tensions. In the context
of this recording, it reflects the light shining from the opening Hildegard
of Bingen piece.
A more substantial piece from Oliver Leith, Pushing my thumb through
a plate forms the pivot point around which the collection turns.
The darkness and muted anxiety which has hovered around the previous
music comes to the fore– to use Shibe’s own evocative image,
the Moondog piece High on a Mountain may evoke the jangling
guitars of ‘the band in a lazy bar’ but it is a hauntingly
empty bar. The mood of Leith’s work is suffocating with even the
strums on Shibe’s guitar strings muffled. Originally written for
harp, it is brilliantly reimagined for the guitar.
At this point the album starts to shift from feelings – overt
or covert – of lostness to reflections on what being
found might mean. Shibe points out in his booklet note that
many of these composers were marginal figures for whom the idea of being
found has a peculiar poignancy. Shibe’s reference to ‘the
post modern chaos of the electric guitar’ reminds us too that
that form of the instrument remains at the margins of the acceptable
within classical music. That said, this is the kind of album that could
change all that.
Of course, Meredith Monk is a contemporary composer but she
seems to have been such an essential feature of modern music for so
long that she is already a classic. Paired with Bill Evans’ Peace
Piece, Nightfall brings balm to the troubled spirit in its calm
unfolding wisdom. I will admit when I read the track listing for this
recording I gave a sigh when I saw it included Peace Piece.
In recent years both Igor Levit and Cordelia Williams have included
it masterfully, but in very different ways, in similarly successful
recitals to this one. Surely, I thought, lightning can’t strike
three times with this piece? I was wrong and what I presume
is Shibe’s own reworking of the Bill Evans original is very different
from Levit and Williams.
These two pieces prove to be merely transitions to the more profound
matters of the last pieces included. Obviously Messiaen is the go to
composer for musical mysticism. Originally a motet for choir, the early
O Sacrum Convivium! Is thoroughly transformed here, its more
advanced harmonic language indicating a shift from the mellow mood of
Peace Piece. The contemplative mood of that work and the incantatory
manner of the Monk piece which was intended to evoke the changing light
at sunset, create a quietness in which, in their very different ways,
the full force of the final quartet of works can register.
The spikiness of the Messiaen mirrors in the Found half of the programme
the shards of broken stained glass of the Kildane piece in the Lost
half. Similarly, I can’t help but hear this as Messiaen played
by the jangling strings of the haunted lazy bar band of the Moondog
piece I mentioned earlier.
Out of this strange vision, Venus/Zohreh by British Iranian
composer Shiva Feshareki emerges as a slow, inexorable gathering of
excitement out of its meditative opening. Originally written for string
quartet, in its guitar version I kept thinking of the music of an entirely
different culture – that of Indian classical music. This is music
of breathtaking simplicity. Its arpeggiated figures gather speed and
volume and density reaching a thrashing climax. It is the shimmering
hazy effects of the music that transport the listener. The composer
comments that Venus denotes the material, astronomical planet where
Zohreh, the Iranian for Venus, stands for “the spiritual energies”
of love. It is those energies that the simple patterns and the simple
path of a continuous accelerando and crescendo so powerfully evoke.
In Shibe’s hands, it is stunning.
Having released those energies, Shibe takes us into outer space with
a second arrangement of a piece by Hildegard of Bingen that wouldn’t
sound out of place on a Tangerine Dream album. The effect is one of
glorious, mystical release – surely most appropriate for this
most mystical of composers. Where the earlier arrangement of her work
stayed close to the original, this one completely reinvents it to the
point where it is almost a Shibe original.
Surely, my already staggered mind thought to itself on first listen,
that must be the peak of this disc?
Again I was wrong. Out of the stratosphere of the Bingen looms the truly
terrifying grandeur of Julius Eastman's Buddha. Eastman's story
is almost too heartbreaking to retell though it needs to be told. A
tale of marginalisation and neglect leading to mental ill health, homelessness,
addiction and many his extraordinary compositions lost to posterity.
I can’t do justice to the heroic efforts of those who have sought,
against improbable odds, to salvage and recreate his works. I hope anyone
hearing and being bowled over by this concluding piece will seek out
what remains of his oeuvre - it is tremendous music that should be better
known. What we get here is truly visionary in the best sense. It elevates
the listener to consider the deeper, more important things in life and
Shibe’s carefully curated collection, triumphantly bring Eastman's
music home. If I can indulge a little waxing biblical, what was lost
is found.
David McDade
Contents
Hildegard von Bingen (c.1098-1179)
O Viridissima Virga (arr. Sean Shibe)
Chick Corea (1941-2021)
Children’s Song 1 (arr. Forbes Henderson)
Daniel Kidane (b. 1986)
Continuance
Chick Corea
Children’s Song 4 (arr. Forbes Henderson)
Moondog (1916-1999)
Sea Horse
Pastoral II
High on a Rocky Ledge
Chick Corea
Children’s Song 2 (arr. Forbes Henderson)
Oliver Leith (b. 1990)
Pushing my thumb through a plate
Meredith Monk (b. 1942)
Nightfall (arr. Sean Shibe) +
Bill Evans (1929-1980)
Peace Piece
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)
O Sacrum Convivium!
Shiva Feshareki (b. 1987)
VENUS/ZOHREH (arr. Shiva Feshareki and Sean Shibe)
Hildegard von Bingen
O Choruscans Lux Stellarum (arr. Sean Shibe)
Julius Eastman (1940-1990)
Buddha
Published: October 17,
2022
