You might think you know what Spanish guitar music sounds like, and you might think it an unexpectedly middle-of-the-road choice for Sean Shibe, who has always appeared more at home in programmes that set your ears slightly off-kilter: for example, juxtaposing whispering lute music with screaming electric guitar works by Julia Wolfe, as on his 2018 album softLOUD. But there’s nothing hackneyed about Camino. It’s a beautifully intimate recording, full of playing that is as far from classical-guitar cliche as a real flamenco dancer is from a postcard of a donkey in a sombrero.
The programme crosses the musically porous border of Spain and France via Catalonia, taking in Ravel, Satie and Poulenc alongside Falla and Antonio José, a Burgos-born composer admired by Ravel and killed aged 33 by a Falangist firing squad. José’s elegiac Pavana Triste – the third movement of a guitar sonata that I would very much like to hear from Shibe in its entirety – follows on beautifully here from Falla’s Danza del Molinero from his ballet The Three-Cornered Hat, which is full of big, bold gestures and soft, subtle shifts in colour.
All the transitions from piece to piece, key to key, have been similarly meticulously thought through – but what’s really striking is the way in which Shibe sustains a world of intensity and introspection through playing that buzzes with vitality. The attention to detail in his playing is breathtaking; nothing interrupts the flow of the music, and nothing is done purely for effect. Only in the swirling lines of the Catalan composer Frederic Mompou’s Dansa 6 is the melodic line less than crystal clear. Following on from a starkly eloquent version of Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante Défunte and Falla’s funereal Homenaje in memory of Debussy, it’s Mompou’s Suite Compostelana that forms the programme’s climax, with six eclectic movements including a hypnotic lullaby and a vibrant closing dance. It was written for the ground-breaking guitarist Andrés Segovia, who made its first recording. Shibe’s playing of it is spellbinding, more tender and flowing than Segovia’s at every turn.
This week’s other pick
Transitions is an introduction to the neglected Ukrainian composer Viktor Kosenko from the pianist Igor Gryshyn. Kosenko’s 11 Études, Op 8, are presented alongside the four Op 22 Preludes and the Sonata No 4 by his influential contemporary Scriabin, and Gryshyn’s urgent playing brings out their sweeping, irresistibly melodic qualities.
