Latest news with #Shibe
The Herald Scotland
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
From the lute to electric guitar - 400 years of music
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. Read More: 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.
The Herald Scotland
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
A fitting end to the East Neuk Festival
Bowhouse, St Monans More usually it is the job of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to close the East Neuk Festival at the Bowhouse, but that task has gone to an agglomeration of string quartets this year, so this marvellous menu of melodic orchestral music opened the programme, and the surprisingly fine acoustic of the big farm shed seemed even more startling as a result. At the heart of the concert was Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez with Edinburgh's international guitar star Sean Shibe as the soloist. The work is not just the only guitar concerto everyone knows but has one of the most familiar openings of any concerto, one that immediately suggests the start of both the finale and the beautiful Adagio theme the soloist shares with the orchestra's cor anglais. Read More: Shibe's guitar was subtly amplified with a microphone and small PA to assure its place in the balance, and his relaxed, virtuosic playing – he must already have performed the piece countless times – was always clear but never over-dominant. Conductor Andrew Manze's sympathetic shaping of the music, ensuring that every detail of conversation between the guitar and the other players was heard, was just as essential to what was an immaculate account of the work. Manze brought the same expansive approach to Schubert's Symphony No 6 after the interval, his realisation of the variations of tempi and dynamics in the slow movement and following Scherzo bringing out all the symphony's youthful drama. His startlingly light touch in the finale emphasised its pastoral feel, which echoed the less well-known piece that had opened the concert. Lars-Erik Larsson is a 20th century contemporary of Rodrigo, and the Swede's Pastoral Suite, from immediately before the Second World War, is a three-movement concerto for orchestra of enormous charm. The SCO strings were on stellar form from the start, and its central Romance has lush scoring that invites comparison with Barber's Adagio and Mahler Five. The lively conclusion, featuring Andre Cebrian's flute and rhythmic pizzicato low strings, sounded close kin to the best mid-20th century British film scores. The 2025 East Neuk Festival had a memorable start, before the SCO played a note, when fiddler Donald Grant entered from the back of the barn and walked through the audience to preface Manze and Shibe's appearance onstage. That atmospheric opening trailed his playing in St Fillan's Cave in Pittenweem at the weekend when he and SCO cellist Su-a Lee soundtrack a new video installation by Andy McGregor.
