Sean Shibe's fifth PENTATONE album, Vesper, presents a striking collection of contemporary guitar works by the late Harrison Birtwistle, James Dillon, and Thomas Ades, all composed by musicians who do not play the instrument themselves. Recorded here for the first time, these recent miniatures explore the guitar's expressive range in profoundly different ways: ritualistic and evocative in Birtwistle, elemental in Dillon, and allusive in Ades. Shibe's interpretations reveal the instrument's extraordinary colour, subtlety, and capacity for transformation, bringing each work to life with imagination and nuance. For some of Birtwistle's pieces, Shibe performs on Sylvette (2021), a guitar made by luthier Simon Ambridge in collaboration with French-British artist Lydia Corbett. A muse to Pablo Picasso - who was himself an important influence for several of Birtwistle's works on this album - Corbett also inspired Picasso's celebrated Sylvette series. Modelled on the small, responsive instruments of the Andalusian luthier Antonio de Torres, the guitar features Corbett's artwork on it's body, adding a visual and symbolic layer to the performance. Shibe is a former BBC New Generation Artist, a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship 2012 winner, a Royal Philharmonic Society 2018 Young Artist Award winner, a multi-GRAMMY nominee, and the recipient of the 2022 Leonard Bernstein Award. His recordings have won BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone Awards.

For a period of the 20th Century, due to his talent and association with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears was perhaps the world's most famous classical singer. Pears inspired Britten to create great works of art precisely because Pears was a compelling artist with an exceptional voice, an inquisitive mind, a knowledge of art, history, literature and poetry. They became a self-perpetuating duo, inspiring each other to even greater heights of artistry, technical ability, and emotional certainty. This album of works by Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Britten, Arthur Oldham, Richard Rodney Bennett and Geoffrey Bush is performed by tenor Robin Tritschler, who is joined by cellist Philip Higham, guitarist Sean Shibe and pianist Malcolm Martineau. Praise for Robin Tritschler and Malcolm Martineau: 4 stars Performance, 4 stars Recording "Robin Tritschler's sweet-toned voice is a continual delight, as is Malcolm Martineau's sparkling, pearly, luminous piano sound" - BBC Music Magazine

Sean Shibe returns to the classical guitar on Profesión, bringing together works by Agustín Barrios, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Alberto Ginastera. The album derives its name from Barrios’s “Profesión de Fe” (profession of faith), a poem which he often used as a preface to his concerts. The poem references indigenous mythological deities, and praises the power of the guitar as the ultimate conduit to the secrets of the divine South-American destiny. Barrios’s La Catedral and Julia Florida are combined with Villa Lobos’s 12 Études, while Ginastera’s Sonata completes the program.

These works by South American composers begin with homage and pastiche in reverence of the Old World, but build towards a totally original idiom - musical magical realism. The repertoire is voluminous, indulging in excess, and narcotic, and as such creates a counterweight to the reserved and introspective nature of Shibe’s acclaimed classical predecessor album Camino.

This will be Shibe’s first-ever album focusing on repertoire that was originally written for the classical guitar, and he plays a Hauser copy built for Julian Bream. It was considered one of the best instruments of the 1930s, and fits the sound world of this program like a glove.

REVIEWS:

It’s an extraordinary account [of the Villa-Lobos], bursting with nuance and personality and easily rivaling Julian Bream’s classic, late-1970s version.

— Gramophone

This is a gleaming and brilliant album that doesn’t fail to awaken the senses to the exhilarating world of un-adulterated acoustic sound.

— BBC Music Magazine

Nominated for a GRAMMY® Award!

Tenor Karim Sulayman and guitarist Sean Shibe present Broken Branches, a conceptual album with music ranging from Dowland, Monteverdi, Britten, Rodrigo, Takemitsu, Harvey, and Chaker to traditional songs from the Middle East, scrutinizing the close cultural and musical ties between East and West. This musical exploration ties in with the artists’ personal experience of a dynamic, in-between identity, as they grew up in the West having ethnic roots in the East (Lebanon and Japan respectively). Broken Branches explores the wood of the guitar and its relatives, as well as the splintering of history known as diaspora. Karim Sulayman has garnered international attention as a sophisticated and versatile artist, and won a Grammy Award for Classical Solo Vocal in 2019. Multi-award-winning guitarist Sean Shibe brings a fresh and innovative approach to the traditional classical guitar, while also exploring contemporary music and repertoire for electric guitar. He continues his exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE after his well-received Camino (2021) and Lost & Found (2022).

REVIEWS:

It’s a thoughtful and idiosyncratic project, one carried through in several arrangements and realizations by the two musicians that blur the line between song and art song into something broadly ‘folkish’.

-- Gramophone

This is an eclectic album, built on friendship, which explores the performers’ own sense of identity, memory, diaspora, often in their own arrangements. Sulayman, a Lebanese-American singer, light-voiced and flexible, brings intensity to traditional Sephardic song, and new inflections to John Dowland, Claudio Monteverdi and Benjamin Britten (his six songs from the Chinese).

-- The Observer (U.K.)

Sean Shibe’s second PENTATONE album Lost & Found is an ecstatic journey containing music by outsiders, mystics, visionaries, who often have more than one identity and lay claim to various artistic traditions, genres, or audiences. The repertoire ranges from Hildegard von Bingen to Olivier Messiaen, Moondog, Julius Eastman, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Meredith Monk, Shiva Feshareki, Oliver Leith and Daniel Kidane. Stretching ten centuries, these pieces are bound together by Shibe’s unique electric guitar sound and aesthetic.

Multi-award-winning guitarist Sean Shibe brings a fresh and innovative approach to the traditional classical guitar, while also exploring contemporary music and repertoire for electric guitar. He continues his exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE after his well-received label debut Camino (2021).

REVIEWS:

Hear more about Lost & Found on NPR's All Things Considered!

Camino is guitarist Sean Shibe’s first PENTATONE album, an introspective programme exploring French-Spanish musical borders, a pilgrimage leading from Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante défunte, Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 and Gnossiennes 1 and 3, Poulenc’s Sarabande, De Falla’s Miller’s Dance and Homaje, pour le Tombeau de Debussy and José’s Pavana triste all the way to Mompou’s Canços i dansas 6 and 10, as well as his Suite compostelana.

Shibe has deliberately granted Mompou a central role on this album, as his music demonstrates that melancholy, aimlessness, and a whole host of other feelings are not things to be avoided or fixed or solved, but experiences to be felt deeply: not with sad nostalgia, but with genuine wonder and excitement at what this means for the future. In that respect, Camino also documents Shibe’s personal quest to overcome the challenges of a time dominated by COVID-19, and to ultimately see the world anew.

Multi-award-winning guitarist Sean Shibe brings a fresh and innovative approach to the traditional classical guitar, while also exploring contemporary music and repertoire for electric guitar. Camino is the first fruit of an exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE.

REVIEW:

Guitarist Sean Shibe has been known for daring programming, and an album of Spanish guitar music might seem a retreat to normalcy, but this is not the case. Shibe devises a program that brings in a wide variety of effects and moods and executes it all flawlessly. The program is both constantly shifting and entirely absorbing, and any stereotypes of Spanish music the listener may have will be gone by its end.

-- AllMusic.com (James Manheim)