Festival review: Sean Shibe, Queen’s Hall, five stars

That taste for quality tailoring was reflected in a programme that mapped music for his instrument from the 16th century to the present decade in Spain (before the interval) and England (after). The two new works, Francisco Coll’s four-movement Sefarad, and the six Forgotten Dances by Thomas Ades, which Shibe has championed, were the major pieces, ending each half of the recital, and his journey to them was very precisely plotted.

Two of Alonso Mudarra’s Fantasias (from 1546) opened the concert, the clarity of the grace notes and interpretive dynamics immediately engrossing. Rodrigo’s Tres Piezas Espagnolas is a mid-20th century response to that heritage, the second of them a Passacaglia that would find echoes later on, as did the descending figure that was the basis of the third.

Coll’s 2025 work draws on Sephardic folk tunes and may never have the regular pulse of Rodrigo’s music but its constantly changing rhythms are just as seductive, especially in the longer outer movements. The closing one, Hija (daughter), is especially attractive and required Shibe to play his classical instrument with both a bottleneck slide and a first knuckle thimble-like version on his pinkie.

The Ades piece was prefaced by three early English pieces by John Dowland, the second of which, Forlorn Hope Fancy, is built on a descending line that is close kin to Henry Purcell’s Dido’s Lament and also recalled the Rodrigo.

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Those parallels would come into further focus in the last of the Forgotten Dances, dedicated to Purcell and based on one of his Vespers. Those dedications are a crucial feature of the work which covers a vast amount of ground in its stylistic variations, and is always captivating in its musical picture-painting.

Possibly only the fourth, “Barcarolle - The Maiden Voyage”, is actually danceable, but the second, “Courante - Here was a swift,” is a beguiling picture of the darting bird that is always on the wing and the fifth, “Carillon de Ville (for Hector Berlioz)”, is, as you might guess, a peal of bells over the town square.

That closing Vesper, as well as sharing DNA with the Dowland, also bore a resemblance to Peter Maxwell Davies’s Farewell to Stromness, so it was no surprise that Shibe played his version of that popular classic as an encore.

He also had a personal reason to do so. The guitarist was brought up very near to the Queen’s Hall and the piece was a favourite of a family friend who died earlier this summer; 96 years old, it had been his proud boast to have attended every Edinburgh Festival since its inception in 1947.

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