From the lute to electric guitar - 400 years of music

The Herald Scotland

14 hours ago

Various venues, Anstruther
Journeys in the East Neuk Festival can be as short as a few hundred yards between venues, but encompass vast eras in time.
Saturday's Shibe Trail in Anstruther was very localised, although the performance spaces had been carefully chosen to match the needs of the music. With lute, classical guitar and then an electric guitar, Sean Shibe took his audience through 400 years of music.
In the Dreel Halls that exploration had very local beginnings, as some of the earliest manuscripts for lute come from the collections of country estates in Fife. They included French music as well as Scottish tunes, but little from England, speaking of the trade and political links of the time.
As the musician wryly pointed out, the technical limitations of the lute present challenges for guitarists, but the day proved that Shibe is a master of those as much as of the sonic possibilities of contemporary technology. The French music he played was especially lyrical, rhythmic and romantic, and John Dowland's Frog Galliard was a more familiar song on which to end the first recital.
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At St Ayle, a step up from the shore, Shibe began his classical guitar set with a short French overture before playing his own arrangement of a Bach Cello Suite to preface a work composed for him by Thomas Ades. The six movements of Forgotten Dances clearly owe a debt to Bach, but the various movements range from the gently melodic through driving rhythms and Satie-esque eccentricity to a wistful, elegiac theme and variations over a ground bass.
At an earlier East Neuk Festival, Shibe first unveiled his Soft/Loud project in the Dreel Halls, and it is fair to say that Anstruther's high-ceilinged Erskine Hall proved a more appropriate place for the volume of his electric guitar. This last concert was built around Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint, a work for which he is now internationally recognised, not least by the composer himself.
If there is no-one playing that piece better, the compositions on either side of it were equally fascinating. Sasha Scott's Rush was also written specifically for Shibe and might remind listeners older than either the composer or the player of the solo excursions of King Crimson's Robert Fripp.
Meredith Monk's Nightfall began life as wordless choral composition, and this multi-layered arrangement, incrementally assembled and then stripped down, preserved its essence while taking it in another direction. Ideally, perhaps, the sun would have been setting as it faded away, but it was yet too early in the sunny East Neuk and there was still more music to be enjoyed.