softLOUD: music for acoustic and electric guitars
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MACMILLAN / WOLFE / LANG / REICH
softLOUD: music for acoustic and electric guitars
Sean Shibe (guitar)
[ Delphian / CD ]
Release Date: Friday 21 September 2018
This item is currently out of stock. We expect to be able to supply it to you within 2 - 4 weeks from when you place your order.
Shortlisted in both 'Instrumentalist' and 'Young Artist' categories at the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Awards, Sean Shibe makes his second outing on Delphian with a programme of radical contrasts that showcases virtuosity at both extremes. Where his debut album Dreams & Fancies paid homage to the guitar repertoire created by his great predecessor Julian Bream, softLOUD looks ambitiously forward, with a mix of electric and acoustic, early and modern, whose contradictions and challenges speak to our own times.
The gentle beauty of Scottish lute manuscripts and of two short instrumental solos by James MacMillan is confronted by, and holds its own against, music by New York-based composers Julia Wolfe - a work of cathartic grief and anger originally scored for nine bagpipes - and David Lang, whose electric violin work Killer is ironclad in its abrupt fury. Shibe has arranged all of this music himself, and presents it here alongside a breathtaking recording of Steve Reich's now classic Electric Counterpoint. 'Have we today forgotten how to speak with grace,' Shibe asks, 'or is the real danger that we aren't screaming loudly enough?'
"There's no doubting that [Shibe] is an artist blessed with grace to spare, and a roar that is fearsome - witness the opening section of Julia Wolfe's LAD which screams into anguished life before cornering into lament, then frenzied catharsis…Like Julian Bream before him, Shibe has a natural yet creative rapport with 17th-century lute music…Both refract the music through a generous soundworld that demands you savour every note." BBC Music Instrumental Choice November 2018
"Shibe imbues the early Scottish lute pieces with a profoundly moving intensity that carries them far beyond their modest frames, through to the MacMillan arrangements, themselves as much transitions from the old to the new as Reich's Electric Counterpoint, which seems to gather the previous works in a boppy afterparty." Gramophone
"I suspect his beautifully touched-in accounts of pieces from 17th-century Scottish manuscripts will get more living-room plays than Julia Wolfe's LAD, an abrasive electric-guitar scream originally conceived for nine bagpipes. In between, he also supplies a definitive performance of Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint." The Guardian
Tracks:
1. James Oswald
Divertimento I [03:03]
2. Wemyss Manuscript (MS)
Ladie lie near me [01:14]
3. Wemyss MS
Mervell's Sarabande [00:41]
4. Balcarres MS
A Scotts Tune, by Mr. Lesslie [01:02]
5. Wemyss MS
Holi and Faire [00:58]
6. Rowallan MS
Swit Sant Nickola [01:02]
7. Straloch MS
The Canaries I [01:09]
8. Straloch MS
The Canaries II [00:43]
9. Rowallan MS
A Scots Tune [02:52]
10. James MacMillan (b. 1959)
From Galloway [02:53]
11. James MacMillan
Motet I from Since it was the Day of Preparation [04:17]
12. Steve Reich (b. 1936)
Electric Counterpoint [14:49]
15. Julia Wolfe (b. 1958)
LAD [16:29]
18. David Lang (b. 1957)
Killer [04:47]
