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The guitar is the epicentre of so much contemporary music, and not just in the West; in classical music, however, if not quite marginal, it’s no rival for the piano and the violin. Still, there are plenty of guitarists working to ensure that it remains in the classical instrumentarium. One of the most interesting is Sean Shibe (his surname rhymes, more or less, with Sheba), whether he’s playing acoustic or amplified.
Born in Scotland to English and Japanese parents, he takes an expansive approach to music-making. There’s a lovely YouTube video of him performing Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint at the Wigmore Hall during a Covid lockdown. The auditorium is empty apart from a radio announcer, and Shibe – barefoot – plays to the accompaniment of several pre-recorded versions of himself. The result is mesmerising.
New music is central to his work, and at last night’s Prom, he premiered Mark Simpson’s ZEBRA (or, 2-3-74: The Divine Invasion of Philip K Dick): the link to science fiction writer Dick is perhaps best taken on trust. Simpson pitted Shibe’s electric guitar against a largeish symphony orchestra (the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Anja Bihlmaier) augmented by synthesiser, organ and no fewer than eight percussionists. Amplification helped, of course, creating a kind of separate “room” which Simpson exploited imaginatively, allowing Shibe’s playing to get lost in the maelstrom only when he wanted it to be.
To begin with the guitar had the whine and weight of heavy metal but denser, more doleful, while the beginning of the second movement (“Horselover Fat’s Hymn of the Soul”) had something Hawaiian about it. The final movement found the guitar floating one moment, scurrying the next before finally subsiding into the orchestra. Over its 20-minute duration, ZEBRA proved engaging but elusive: a second listen via BBC Sounds is definitely on the agenda.
I have an inbuilt resistance to Richard Strauss’s so-called tone poems: they strike me as too discursive, too illustrative. That’s their point, of course. In any case, Bihlmaier’s account of his Death and Transfiguration almost converted me. Her energetic manner encouraged the orchestra’s virtuosity: in the first five minutes alone, virtually every woodwind instrument had a glittering solo. Whatever my doubts, Strauss’s shifting moods – loud and showy, calm and diaphanous, at times even pastoral – were set out with minute precision.
The Prom ended with Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, at least as virtuosic as the Strauss, and like Simpson’s concerto, fortified by an extravagant array of percussionists. Bihlmaier showed herself a consummate judge of texture and tempo, allowing every incident – pizzicatos so delicate they barely disturbed the air, brass blaring fit to raise the dead – to register with maximum effect. Even today, the climactic Witches’ Sabbath raises a delicious shudder.
The Proms continue until September 13; royalalberthall.com
