Sean Shibe on Vesper

Released on Pentatone last month and described as 'acutely articulate and technically impeccable' by The Guardian, Sean Shibe's latest album Vesper features the world premiere recordings of Thomas Adès’s Forgotten Dances and James Dillon's 12 Caprices (both written for the Scottish guitarist), plus a selection of works by the late Harrison Birtwistle - including the Julian Bream commission Beyond the White Hand (Construction with Guitar Player) and a handful of piano pieces in transcriptions by Forbes Henderson, who had close relationships with composer and commissioner alike.

Ahead of his Edinburgh International Festival debut this summer (which will feature Forgotten Dances), Sean spoke to Presto about the three composers' different approaches to writing for the instrument, the Spanish connections which run throughout the programme, and the network of friendships behind the album...

Photo of Sean Shibe by Camilla Greenwell

Thomas Adès's Forgotten Dances and James Dillon's 12 Caprices were both written for you - how much input did you have during their gestation?

Each of these composers is an interesting case in terms of their approach to collaboration and writing for the guitar. James Dillon is a guitarist himself, Harrison Birtwistle spent a lot of time with Jonathan Leathwood and Julian Bream, and Tom Adès is just supremely clever, talented and responsive. We used video quite a lot to shoot ideas back and forth: he’d send me drafts of sections asking for feedback on how things sat under the hand, and I’d film myself trying out what he’d written and offering some alternative versions with tweaks to certain notes or chords which worked better on the instrument. It was so much more efficient than trying to explain it over email, and it was incredible to see how he’d adjust the rest of the piece to accommodate that. It resulted in absolutely immaculate writing.

How much is that writing indebted to the English lute tradition?

There’s an element of that, although we aren’t ringfenced into Renaissance and Baroque territory. Tom’s initial idea was to create a little set of works similar to Couperin's Ordres, which don’t need to be played complete or consecutively - you can reorder them how you want. But in terms of what the pieces are inspired by or playing off, there’s a plethora of different influences and some are more enigmatic than others. 

You do have that lovely Purcell-inspired chaconne at the end of the set and some allusions to the French overture and courante in the first and third movements, but there’s also a berceuse, a ghostly waltz, references to Satie, and the 'Carillon de Vie' which is very Berlioz-ish…There’s all sorts going on, and what’s so cool about this set of pieces is that Tom is able to draw all of these influences together to create something that really does hang together very well as a set.

Which came first: the arrangement of the Habanera from The Exterminating Angel or Forgotten Dances?

The Habanera came first. It was originally an interlude with mezzo-soprano, and the music is fantastically dense and complex; I didn’t manage to see the opera in the theatre, but when I watched it on video it leapt out at me as something that could be adapted as a stand-alone concert piece.  It struck me as something that would be very easy to programme in recitals, partly because of the Spanish connections…and other people obviously felt the same, because by the time the first run of the opera finished there were already one or two guitarists posting it on YouTube! 

I thought I should probably check with Tom to see if he thought it could work, so I played the piece to him and said it was something I’d like to include in concerts; this was shortly before we first worked together on the UK premiere of his pupil Francisco Coll’s concerto Turia in 2021. We made a couple of tiny alterations to the ends of phrases - I think it was a case of inserting one rest and one extra chord! - but it transferred very easily onto the guitar and quickly took on a life of its own. 

I’d heard that when I played the Habanera to Tom he started thinking that there might be scope for a set of miniatures based on the opera, and sowing that seed paid off a bit later on when I got on the European Concert Halls Rising Star scheme…They were keen to commission new works, and I thought that even though Tom doesn’t exactly need the exposure at this point he might still be tempted by having a piece performed in twenty top venues. It was pure luck that he said yes to Forgotten Dances because it was at a time when he was writing a lot of orchestral music, but he produced these pieces really quickly because they felt like they were a refreshing thing to work on.

They occupy a very different soundworld to James Dillon’s 12 Caprices…

James’s set of pieces make such a great contrast because they’re so self-contained: in a sense I feel like Tom’s music is just exploding the guitar in this incredibly expansive way, whereas James’s Caprices are these perfect little universes. That took me by surprise when I first received the score, because it was so different from what we’d originally discussed: I’d approached James about commissioning a piece for electric guitar before the lockdowns and he was planning on writing something on a much larger scale which would take up an entire evening. The question of what to programme with a new piece is always at the forefront of James’s mind, and in this case his solution was for it to simply be the concert! That project got derailed by COVID, then five years later he emailed me out of the blue with these little pieces which were ten minutes long!

Being a guitarist himself, James is able to write very efficiently and idiomatically for the instrument without any input from the performer, and I was really pleased with the results. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them in terms of programming, but after I’d played them a few times I put them in a concert with Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître; that’s a very difficult piece to programme in itself, but they worked so well together. They’re also a nice counterpoint to the Adès and the Birtwistle, because they’re miniature in every sense but also somehow the most cosmic of the pieces on the album.

You mentioned the ‘Spanish connections’ with the Adès Habanera, and in your booklet-note you observe that ‘each composer presents a link to Spain in one way or another’ - can you unpack that for me?

It’s often the case that composers who write for the classical guitar are trying to escape the Spanish soundworld, and in most cases they don’t! I reckon that Tom has succeeded in Forgotten Dances; James Dillon sounds pretty Spanish in some ways, though there are other influences at work too... Birtwistle has an almost philosophically Spanish approach to the instrument, in a way that puts me in mind of Francisco Coll again: Francisco doesn’t see the classical guitar as a romantically Spanish object but as a medievally Spanish object, tracing its lineage back to those curious ‘exotic’ instruments that were brought over to Spain from North Africa all those centuries ago…If you look at the origins of the guitar, it’s not an inherently ‘sophisticated’ instrument and its history is very complex and contorted - I think both Francisco and Harry lean into that to explore a darker, less sentimental soundworld than a lot of composers.

Birtwistle’s Beyond the White Hand: Construction with Guitar Player was commissioned by Julian Bream - what sort of working relationship did they have?

They actually shared a birthday (15th July), but I can’t exactly imagine them throwing a joint party! In fact it was at Bream’s eightieth birthday celebrations that he had a huge bust-up with Harry and his son Silas about the piece - the booklet-notes rather diplomatically state that Bream ‘told them where to go’, but he literally said ‘F*** off, get out of my party!’. They were in no uncertain terms made unwelcome, and the compromise which was eventually brokered by the publishers was really not what Harry originally wanted: you have to stick by that now because it’s contracted, but I think it’s interesting that most of the compromising seems to have been on his part rather than Bream’s... 

Part of the issue was just that Birtwistle didn’t have his glasses with him when he and Jonathan Leathwood went over to Bream’s house to work on the piece together, but the main problem was that Bream wasn’t someone who was able at that point to properly oversee the editing process. He achieved amazing things because he was a raw force of nature, but the flip side was that he was a control freak who didn’t delegate well when issues needed to be resolved. The published edition of this piece is a casualty of that: there are two score-breaking issues in terms of metrical modulations that result in tempi which I don’t think anybody has ever actually done and which I don’t think were what Birtwistle wanted either.

I don’t know whether he still plays, but Silas was an amateur guitarist himself: Harry wrote him a little piece called Guitar with White Hand which ended up providing the inspiration for the Bream commission Beyond the White Hand. (The subtitle ‘Construction with Guitar Player’ which got Bream’s back up was also Silas’s idea!)

I also remember Silas saying that when Harry wrote Je sui aussi, he’d recently joined a guitar quartet after taking a break from playing, and had only vaguely mentioned that his dad was a composer…they played it through together once, and the others’ reaction was ‘No idea who this Harrison Birtwistle guy is, but what the hell is he up to here?!’. I do understand that initial response, because on first encounter the piece feels like it could have been written by various different people, but when you sit with it for a while it feels inevitably, unmistakably Harry.

Forbes Henderson made the beautiful transcriptions of the three Birtwistle piano pieces which we hear on the album - was he close to the composer?

Forbes is someone who’s very dear to me, and indeed to various people who’ve come up in this conversation: he and Silas were pub-buddies, and he used to be very close to Bream, filing his nails for him and having a bit of a booze on occasion!

Harry went to him when he was struggling with inspiration for the Bream commission, and it was Forbes’s idea to take that little piece Guitar with White Hand as the starting-point; Harry just ran with that, and it blossomed into a much bigger work in its own right. Forbes has played in various constellations and genres throughout his career: he premiered works by composers like Colin Downs but also appeared on Top of the Pops as a member of the popular world music band Incantations who wrote the 1980s hit 'Cacharpaya'.

Do you have plans to perform any of these works in recital in the coming seasons?

I’ve tended not to play the entire programme live, because saying ‘Here is an evening of brain-melting music from the first quarter of the twenty-first century’ isn’t realistically going to fill a concert-hall…I’d love it if that was what people were into, but at the end of the day it’s a hard sell! 

For the next tour that I’m doing [which includes Shibe’s debut at the Edinburgh International Festival], the first half is pieces by early Spanish Renaissance composers Alonso Mudarra and Luis de Narvéez alongside three pastiche Baroque pieces by Rodrigo and a new work called Sefarad by Francisco Coll. Francisco creates some incredibly unusual sonorities on the instrument, and he's also looking back to older music so it’s a nice little juxtaposition with what’s gone before. Then the second half is three pieces by Dowland and Adès’s Forgotten Dances,  so the overall idea is to give two different representations of the two most important traditions in the twentieth-century guitar repertoire – the Spanish music that Segovia commissioned, and also Bream’s creation of the modern English guitar literature.