| Guitar |
Sean Shibe – Vesper: A Solo Guitar Album of Rare Imagination, Depth and Colour.
Vesper, the new recording by Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe on Pentatone, is an album that change the way you think about the guitar. With nothing but two hands, six strings and an extraordinary imagination, Shibe takes us through an hour of contemporary music by three great British composers (Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle and James Dillon) and turns each piece into a small world. It is subtle, daring, beautiful and deeply moving, and it receives the highest mark on Paris-Move: a must.
The idea behind the album is fascinating. All the music here was written by composers who do not play the guitar themselves, and the works are recorded for the first time, which gives the whole programme the feel of a discovery. Each composer approaches the instrument from a different angle: Birtwistle is ritualistic and evocative, Dillon elemental, and Adès allusive. Shibe plays them with such conviction that the differences become part of the pleasure, and the album holds together as a recital with its own logic, with interlocking themes of Spain, painters of the twentieth century, and old musical forms.
The recognition has been quick to arrive. Vesper was named an Editor’s Choice by Gramophone, shortlisted for the 2026 Gramophone Awards in the contemporary category, and has just won the Chitarra d’Oro 2026 in Italy for the best solo guitar CD. It is the fifth album that Shibe has made for Pentatone, and it confirms his place among the most original guitarists of the century, a former BBC New Generation Artist whose earlier recordings have already won Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine awards.
The heart of the album is Forgotten Dances by Thomas Adès, written for Shibe and the composer’s first independent work for solo classical guitar. It is a suite in six movements that plays with the forms of the old Baroque dance suite, giving each a strange, witty and poetic extra layer. As Adès puts it, we have forgotten the steps, but they remain somewhere in the DNA of the music.
“Overture, Queen of the Spiders” opens the set with stately harmonics, sneaking slides and sudden pounces, a spider’s web that the composer compares to the fretboard itself. “Berceuse, The Paradise of Thebes” is a lullaby that sways in an unstable rhythm, its melody blurred by slides, tremolos and trills, so that you are lulled into a kind of happy oblivion. “Courante – Here was a swift (for Max Ernst)” is a spectacular, frantic reinvention of the dance, as fast as the bird of its title, yet with the slap of fingers on strings to keep it grounded. “Barcarolle – The Maiden Voyage” is tender and nostalgic, a gently lapping evocation of a sea crossing made by the composer’s grandmother when she was fifteen. “Carillon de Ville (for Hector Berlioz)” begins with the guitar’s most beautiful harmonics and grows, almost miraculously, into the clamour of bells that closes Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. And the title piece, “Vesper (for Henry Purcell)”, takes the ground bass of Purcell’s Evening Hymn and bends and embellishes it, in a long, consoling and slightly unsettling farewell.
Adès’s short Habanera, drawn from his opera The Exterminating Angel (where it was an aria for mezzo-soprano, guitar and ondes Martenot), appears later as a vivid, grotesque encore.
Harrison Birtwistle’s music often sounds primal and ritualistic, with wandering melodies and an enigmatic expressiveness, and the guitar, with its natural affinity for silence and its uneven resonance, turns out to be a surprising ally. The centrepiece is Beyond the White Hand: Construction with Guitar Player, over eighteen minutes long and inspired by a Picasso guitar sculpture and by an earlier Birtwistle work, Guitar and White Hand, which is also included. It is a series of short episodes woven together by silence, with cubist overtones in which rough, grungy sounds and delicate calligraphy sit side by side. Shibe masters its fragmentary architecture and has a wonderful gift for letting a single note ring out in apparent contrast with everything around it. The piece is demanding, but it is gripping, and this performance gives it a clear and hypnotic shape.
Then there are five small pieces, overtly simple and gently spiked with something that suddenly opens up a cavern of thought or emotion. “Oockooing Bird”, written when Birtwistle was only sixteen, is his earliest acknowledged score. “Sleep Song” and “Berceuse de Jeanne” are bewitching lullabies, “Sad Song” is desperately lonely, and “Je sui aussi” is a miniature of one minute. Three of them are arrangements for guitar by Forbes Henderson of piano originals, and they are a revelation: you would swear they were written for the instrument. For some of these pieces, Shibe plays a very special guitar, Sylvette (2021), made by luthier Simon Ambridge with the artist Lydia Corbett, who was Picasso’s muse, with her artwork painted on its body, a lovely visual echo of the painter’s influence on Birtwistle.
James Dillon, better known for large-scale projects that take years to complete, shows here a completely different side with his 12 Caprices, tiny pieces that last from half a minute to a minute and forty seconds. Each has its own character and its own acoustic idea: the first should be played with real nervousness, the seventh with nonchalance, and others explore plucked and arpeggiated chords, dark and bright sounds, counterpoint and sensuous harmony. They can seem aphoristic at first, like thoughts caught on the wing and set down on paper, but they are never superficial, and Shibe gives each a clear identity, with a pleasingly straight geometry in the tenth and a satisfyingly final last word in the twelfth. Remarkably, they almost completely avoid the guitar’s most persistent mood, its sadness.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about the album is what Shibe achieves from one bar to the next: the precision of his articulation, the range of colours he finds, his control of the instrument’s fragile resonance. On the small scale, it is a lesson in technique; on the large scale, it is the depth he reaches with these miniature stories, each one a small drama. His playing is always articulate, technically impeccable and, above all, imaginative. It is also never self-serving: it is clear that he takes this music very seriously, and wants you to listen to it as music, not as “a guitar album”. Yet, for non-guitarists, it is almost impossible not to marvel at what is happening.
The recording is crystal clear, the guitar sounds close, rich and natural, and each harmonic, each slide and each silence is captured. The heavyweight booklet, with notes by Hugh Morris and Jonathan Leathwood, is excellent, providing a great deal of context to help you listen.
For the guitarist that I was, Vesper is that fantastic rare thing: a contemporary-music album that is both intellectually fascinating and immediately enjoyable. It expands the guitar repertoire of our time, it introduces you to music that deserves to be heard, and it features an artist at the peak of his art, who unites virtuosity with real research. You can listen to it as a whole, as a journey from the Baroque ghosts of Adès to the silences of Birtwistle and the sparks of Dillon, or piece by piece, as a series of mind-expanding flights of fancy. Either way, you will want to return to it. The most innovative and beautiful solo guitar record of the year, and “a must”.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, October 29th, 2026
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Tracklisting:
Thomas Adès – Forgotten Dances
1) I. Overture, Queen of the Spiders 3:21
2) II. Berceuse, The Paradise of Thebes 3:55
3) III. Courante – Here was a swift (for Max Ernst) 1:49
4) IV. Barcarolle – The Maiden Voyage 2:26
5) V. Carillon de Ville (for Hector Berlioz) 2:16
6) VI. Vesper (for Henry Purcell) 6:11
Harrison Birtwistle
7) Beyond the White Hand: Construction with Guitar Player 18:26
8) Guitar and White Hand 1:54
Thomas Adès
9) Habanera from ‘The Exterminating Angel’ 2:55
Harrison Birtwistle
10) Oockooing Bird (Arr. for guitar by Forbes Henderson) 2:42
11) Sleep Song 1:28
12) Berceuse de Jeanne (Arr. for guitar by Forbes Henderson) 2:56
13) Sad Song (Arr. for guitar by Forbes Henderson) 2:27
14) Je sui aussi 1:01
James Dillon (b. 1950)
12 Caprices
15) Caprice 1. 0:28
16) Caprice 2. 0:38
17) Caprice 3. 1:39
18) Caprice 4. 0:35
19) Caprice 5. 0:34
20) Caprice 6. 0:52
21) Caprice 7. 0:44
22) Caprice 8. 0:54
23) Caprice 9. 0:52
24) Caprice 10. 1:10
25) Caprice 11. 1:08
26) Caprice 12. 1:01
Total Duration: 1hr 04min
Musician:
Sean Shibe – guitar (including Sylvette, a 2021 guitar by Simon Ambridge with artwork by Lydia Corbett, on some of the Birtwistle pieces)