‘Broken Branches’ – Sulayman/Shibe: Purcell, Dowland, Caccini, Monteverdi, Traditional, Darwish/Fairuz, Harvey, Chaker, Takemitsu, and Britten, 14 July 2026

Wigmore Hall

Purcell: Oedipus, King of Thebes, Z 583: ‘Music for a while’
Dowland: Preludium; Fantasia no.7; Time stands still
Giulio Caccini: Dalla porta d’oriente
Monteverdi: Quarto scherzo delle ariose vaghezze: ‘Sì dolce è’l tormento’, SV 332; ‘La mia turca che d’amor’, SV 310
Trad. Sephardic, arr. Sulayman and Shibe: La Prima Vez
Trad. Andalusian, arr. Sulayman and Shibe: Lamma Bada Yatathanna
Sayeed Dawish, arr. Sulayman and Shibe: El Helwa Di
Ziad Rahbani and Fairuz: Le Beirut (based on Joaquin Rodrigo, arr. Sulayman and Shibe)
Jonathan Harvey: Sufi Dance
Layale Chaker: A Butterfly in New York
Takemitsu: In the Woods: ‘Wainscot Pond’
Britten: Songs from the Chinese, op.58

Karim Sulayman (tenor)

Sean Shibe (guitar)

Does the butterfly ‘… know/That I no longer run/After butterflies?/Just watch them in silence/That I live/Like a broken branch’? In Sinan Antoon’s poem, ‘A Butterfly in New York’, translated by the author from the original Arabic and set to music by Layale Chaker, memory of a butterfly ‘chased … so often/in our Baghdad garden’ contrasts with the new reality of the ‘broken branch’ which, pluralised, gives its name to this programme of cultural encounters and mystical unity of human experience from Karim Sulayman and Sean Shibe. In Chaker’s song, Sulayman’s almost unending yet endlessly varied melismata flowed with dark ease, until tellingly it (the music, rather than performance) got stuck, unstuck itself, and so on in a vivid quasi-scena whose progress thus similarly acted as a metaphor for the ‘Broken Branches’ of the recital as a whole. 

We had begun with Purcell, ‘Music for a while’ given at a gorgeously slow tempo, sustained and beautifully shaded by both musicians, Sulayman dwelling playfully on the twin sibilants of ‘snakes’. Throughout, Shibe’s substitution of guitar for lute, oud, and other instruments was always accomplished with care and imagination, neither attempting to render it merely as it would have been nor ignoring the necessity or at least advisability of modification; but then, the same care was devoted to occasions when it appeared ‘as itself’ too. There was never from either musician the slightest sense of ‘one size [or sound] fits all’; such was clear from the very outset. Three Dowland items, a prelude, a fantasia, and the song Time Stands Still, ran into one another, that flow – or, if you prefer, the course of a branch not yet broken – compelling, yet never quite expected, holding our attention through words and music alike. In the song, as so often, one felt almost as if this were a single musician singing and playing, so close was the partnership; yet the visual element, both musicians seated, offered a welcome reminder this was not identity, but collaboration. 

We moved from England to the Mediterranean, at more or less the same time. Caccini’s Dalla porta d’oriente opened a gate to the east of its own, to much of the rest of the programme. However clichéd the idea, it was difficult not to think of greater ‘Italian’ immediacy, rock-solid rhythm underpinning all, strophic structure used to express the words, and Shibe’s guitar interlude here and in the following song splendidly inventive. For Monteverdi’s Si dolce è’l tormento, we went deeper, reflecting the nature of words and music—here in indissoluble union suggesting, however erroneously, mutual conception. The same composer’s La mia turca che d’amor was lighter, humorous, and highly characterful: excellent programming as well as performance, also offering both a bridge to and contrast with the Sephardic near-suspended motion of La Prima Vez. 

That was followed by another solo for Shibe, Lamma Bada Yatathanna, very different from Dowland yet perhaps also united or at least kindred in a keen sense of flow. It led directly into Sayed Darwish’s El Helwa Di, its more popular style captured with just as much care and skill as anything preceding. Here was another vividly communicative performance, Sulayman and Shibe holding the Wigmore Hall audience in their hands. Li Beirut could hardly fail to be an emotional tribute to the city from which Sulayman’s parents emigrated to the United States. We felt sadness, pride, ardour, and defiance. Jonathan Harvey’s Sufi Dance was a fascinating solo for Shibe. It summoned forth all manner of sounds from the guitar in a single, unbroken line: mysticism in motion, as if a ‘prepared guitar’ after Cage met Stockhausen and the inexorability of dance.

Takemitsu’s ‘Wainscot Pond’ offered a typically exquisite and entrancing garden walk, Shibe’s command of line and expressive content revealing a depth that can all too readily be missed, albeit worn with proper lightness of touch. As for Britten’s Songs from the Chinese: well, there was no gainsaying the excellence of the performances, but the composer’s typical archness stood out a little too readily for me here. The Mexican composer Tomás Mendez’s Cucurrucucú Paloma, given as an encore, may have been less overtly ‘clever’, but it sounded more sincere.

Shibe and friends - Dillon, Miller, and Boulez, 29 May 2025

Wigmore Hall

James Dillon: 12 Caprices (world premiere)
Cassandra Miller: Bel Canto
Boulez: Le Marteau sans maître

Sean Shibe (guitar)

Ema Nikolovska (mezzo-soprano)

Adam Walker (flute)

George Barton, Iris van den Bos, Sam Wilson (percussion)

Emma Wernig (viola)

Matthew Hunt (clarinet)

Mira Benjamin (violin)

Colin Alexander (cello)

Alphonse Cemin (conductor)

In this excellent Wigmore Hall concert for Boulez’s centenary year, Sean Shibe and friends, mezzo Ema Nikolovska first among equals, demonstrated once again the stature, challenge, and thrills of what arguably remains the composer’s signature work, Le Marteau sans maître. ‘Without feeling close to Boulez’s music,’ Stravinsky wrote to Nadia Boulanger in 1957, ‘I frankly find it preferable to many things of his generation.’ And we can certainly tend to think of it – almost unavoidably – in terms of music and musicians that had led up to it. Take its Asia-tilted percussion, strongly recalling Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies (for which Boulez turned vibraphone pages at the 1945 premiere), here magically brought to life by George Barton, Iris van den Bos, and Sam Wilson; the crossing and continuation of lines between instruments, immediately apparent here in the first of the work’s nine movements, inevitably reminiscent of Webern, the serialist ‘threshold’; or the mesmerising, even Mozartian ravishment of the third ‘Commentaire’ on ‘Bourreaux de solitude’. (In the latter case, I am sure Così fan tutte did not actually play a role here, but I like to fancy that the older Boulez, recording that extraordinary, unexpected Ensemble Intercontemporain performance of the Serenade, KV 361/370a, alongside Berg’s Chamber Concerto, might nonetheless have subsumed it into his aesthetic realm.) Here, though, we looked, or rather listened, forward, if retrospectively, the first half presenting the world premiere of James Dillon’s 12 Caprices for solo guitar and Cassandra Miller’s 2010 Maria Callas homage, Bel Canto. 

Not having heard Le Marteau for a while – my most recent live encounter might actually have been eight years ago in Vienna – I experienced the joy of rediscovery, but also of that increasing sense in Boulez’s œuvre more widely of taking a place in the great modernist ‘museum’ to which he felt such ambivalent attraction. This is not ‘pointillist’ music, far from it, but using that as a starting-point for exploration, not least that connection of instrumental and vocal lines mentioned above, seemed fitting or at least not entirely absurd in the progress of this performance and the material on which it is founded. ‘Avant “L’Artisanat furieux”’ felt that way, anyway, its archetypal ‘exquisite labyrinth’ becoming ever more involved, conductor Alphonse Cemin and the ensemble equally ensuring there was no loss to visceral experience, no smoothing of the edges. Rhythm, as in Stravinsky, continued to drive. In similar spirit, flute and voice melismata (Adam Walker and Nikolovska) almost yet not quite combined in ‘L’Artisanat furieux’. As Boulez’s serial universe thereafter unfolded, an angrier presentiment perhaps of Pli selon pli, development seemed to occur as much retrospectively as in ‘order’. Relaxation had something splendidly disorienting to it, as if swimming uphill in waters unknown. Process in all its volatility could be felt, even if one could not – should not – put it into words. Throughout, one felt wholehearted commitment from the musicians: not only sure and knowing, but vividly exploratory guides to our ears. An invisible theatre, especially apparent in the two closing movements, welcomed to its stage ghosts from the past: a Pierrot-like line on Emma Wernig’s viola, or Debussyan arabesque upon arabesque incited and invited by Walker’s flute. This was above all music for now, resisting the museum even as it entered in. 

Dillon’s Caprices put me in mind, perhaps coincidentally, but the coincidence was strong, of Boulez’s own piano Notations, similarly aphoristic and twelve in number. Perhaps it was only this context that led me to think that way, but gesture and substance in the very first seemed to come from a related sound-world and mind. They then pursued their own path, of course, offering plentiful space for finely wrought, idiomatic guitar-writing and committed performance. Each caprice laid claim both to individual character in kaleidoscopic variety, and also to a strong sense of progression within the whole. Work and performance alike drew one in, in spellbinding fashion. Quoted in the programme as speaking of ‘a framing of the fugitive’, Dillon brought that Lorca-founded image to spellbinding if swiftly vanishing life, with outstanding advocacy from Shibe. 

In Bel Canto, Nikolovska and two mini-ensembles, one with her onstage, the other behind and above in the balcony, brought to life not only Callas’s ‘Vissi d’arte’, but the passage of time in her career: ‘not only’, in Miller’s words, ‘about the ageing of an extraordinary woman, but also about the listener. Time slows down to allow for an engagement with detail, for a submersion in the sound, and for meditative stillness.’ That is very much what we experienced, time slowing, even near-repeating, as if a record were stuck; and yet, it moved. There was something dream-like, even epiphanic to Nikolvska and the instrumentalists’ revelation, yet whatever one might have felt, there was nothing vague to it, their means as precise as, say, Berio’s layering in his Folk Songs or, indeed, Sinfonia, be they written or left to the performers’ judgement. The midway surprise of an unseen Romantic violin solo from behind (Mira Benjamin), vying in richness with Nikolovska’s voice, ever changing yet ever the same, registered as an invisible coup de théâtre, a prelude to sounds hitherto unimagined yet making perfect sense when they came. Not entirely unlike Le Marteau, one might say, although unmistakeably of the Mediterranean.

Liverman/Walker/Shibe/Gunnell - Henze, El Cimarrón, 11 March 2023

Wigmore Hall

Will Liverman (baritone)

Adam Walker (flute)

Sean Shibe (guitar)

Owen Gunnell (percussion)

I had waited a long, long time for a performance of Henze’s ‘recital for four musicians’ from 1969-70, El Cimarrón. Like other works from the zenith of Henze’s political commitment, it seems largely to be shunned by today’s performers and venues. Hats off, then, to both the Wigmore Hall and to the four musicians involved in this performance, baritone Will Liverman, percussionist Owen Gunnell, flautist Adam Walker and guitarist Sean Shibe, the last two doubling up on various percussion instruments throughout, both for putting on a performance at all and for giving so fine an account of the work. In a sense, one either does this properly or one does not do it at all, but that does not mean one should merely take for granted performing excellence. 

Any idea that El Cimarrón might seem merely dated was thus triumphantly despatched. Many of our ideas concerning cultural appropriation might have changed in the meantime, but the urgency of its message concerning capitalist-imperialist exploitation in general and enslavement of black people in particular, remains at least as apparent as ever. Moreover, Henze’s method of letting escaped slave Esteban Montejo’s testimony essentially speak for itself – albeit with that testimony noted first by the Cuban ethnologist Miguel Barnet, translated into German by Hans Magnus Enzensbeger no less, here further translated into English by Christopher Keene – holds up pretty well in terms of what we might consider respectful, whilst leaving open the question, as Henze explicitly acknowledged concerning works written at this time, of ‘bourgeois’ aesthetic value. 

The idea arose from a conversation Henze and Enzensberger had had round about 1968, concerning ‘the difficulties of writing political songs which would go beyond, or circumvent the achievements of Eisler, Weill, or Dessau’ (Henze). Henze thought some sort of song-cycle a likely result, but in the end El Cimarrón turned out to be, at least according to his understanding, ‘a trial run for a new type of concert’. This, I think, gave a flavour of that: recitation, some song, elements of music theatre, above all a testimony arising from true ensemble cooperation that ‘cannot be done in a few days of rehearsal’, not least when it comes to the necessity for the players to invent music themselves, ‘where only a “graphic” serves as clue, stimulus or signpost’. 

We could not know, of course, at least without detailed knowledge and memory of the score, quite what was notated and how. Nevertheless, a sense not only of ensemble, but of comradeship, emerged. There was no doubt that these were players who were listening closely to one another, listening moreover that was not only instinctive but had also been learned through a political process of rehearsal. The vast array of instruments before our eyes and ears was a mise-en-scène in itself, but also an invitation to a world partly known yet also quite new. Liverman’s move in the first song, ‘The World’, from wordless song to recitation, at times quite Schoenbergian – Henze, however much he distanced himself, could never help himself here – conveyed meaning both through words but also via their means and variety of delivery. Yet it was equally in the interludes, in instrumental transition, as so often in such music, that a good deal of the journey was to be had—and to be reflected upon. 

Elsewhere, music could be frankly pictorial; we all knew what inhuman catastrophe Liverman’s chains depicted, but there was far more: jew’s harp ‘which represents the stars in comic strips that, on such occasions, dance in front of the eyes of the injured party’; pounding African drums offering a truth in sharp contradistinction to that of imported, Roman Catholic priests, Henze and Montejo having no time whatsoever for the hypocrisy, economic, sexual, and otherwise, of the latter. It could also, however, effect mood and drama, for instance, in Montejo’s flight into the mountains—even though, perhaps especially though, this was not a straightforwardly dramatic piece. 

For me, the reflective and revolutionary centre came later than the mid-point; ‘The Rebellion’, ninth of fifteen numbers, went further, deeper, into something approaching true melancholy. The ensuing ecstasy of redress, of revenge, at ‘The Battle of Mal Tiempo’ was highly infectious. Agitprop? If so, it worked. An equally strong impression was made by ‘The Bad Victory’, which followed, the unease of its darkly military parade showing us everything was certainly not what it seemed. And if sounds from the opening returned at the end, this was not to denote something banally cyclical. As Henze explained, and as we seemed to feel, ‘the pre-revolutionary situation is reinstated, looking backwards is ruled out, everything is now directed forward towards a new identity’. 

Not long before El Cimarrón, Henze had resolved that he would no longer write, as he feared he might have fallen into doing, merely for himself and his friends, but rather ‘to help socialism’; that doing so would involving both embodying in his work ‘all the problems of contemporary bourgeois music,’ and transforming them ‘into something that the masses can understand’. That would not involve submitting to commercial considerations, but nor was there any ‘place for worry about losing elite notions of value’. From the beginning, that has led some to question the artistic and/or enduring ‘value’ of such interventions. To experience, however, something that spoke so vividly, if necessarily from its time, to the age of Black Lives Matter proved a necessary surprise and, in its way, a proper call to arms. 

Let us hope, then, that this will mark the beginning of many such opportunities, in London and elsewhere. What next? Perhaps the ‘vaudeville’ La Cubana, or the ‘show for 17 performers’, Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung Natascha Ungeheuers? Simon Rattle performed Henze’s Che Guevara requiem Das Floß der Medusa in Berlin in 2006; might he wish (and be enabled) to bring it to the LSO’s repertoire? (Its celebrated non-premiere, halted by police, might make interesting material for a drama of its own.) Surely it is long past time for the Royal Opera to revive Henze’s collaboration with Edward Bond We Come to the River, or indeed to stage one of Henze’s earlier or later operas. König Hirsch would come top of my list. As Henze’s 2026 centenary nears, a coordinated offering would be just the thing. One can dream...