Vesper: Music for Guitar by Ades, Birtwistle & James Dillon
£14.73
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Label: Pentatone
Cat No: PTC5187518
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 1
Genre: Instrumental
Release Date: 17th April 2026
Contents
Works
Forgotten DancesThe Exterminating Angel
» Habanera
Berceuse de Jeanne (arr. Forbes Henderson for guitar)Beyond the White Hand: Construction with Guitar Player
Guitar and White Hand
Je sui aussi
Oockooing Bird (arr. Forbes Henderson for guitar)
Sad Song (arr. Forbes Henderson for guitar)
Sleep Song
Caprices (12)
Artists
Sean Shibe (guitar)Works
Forgotten DancesThe Exterminating Angel
» Habanera
Berceuse de Jeanne (arr. Forbes Henderson for guitar)Beyond the White Hand: Construction with Guitar Player
Guitar and White Hand
Je sui aussi
Oockooing Bird (arr. Forbes Henderson for guitar)
Sad Song (arr. Forbes Henderson for guitar)
Sleep Song
Caprices (12)
Artists
Sean Shibe (guitar)About
Sean Shibe’s fifth PENTATONE album, Vesper, presents a striking
collection of contemporary guitar works by the late Harrison Birtwistle,
James Dillon, and Thomas Adès, 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 Adès. 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 its 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.
Sound/Video
Paused
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1Adès: Forgotten Dances: I. Overture, Queen of the Spiders
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2Adès: Forgotten Dances: II. Berceuse, The Paradise of Thebes
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3Adès: Forgotten Dances: III. Courante – Here was a swift (for Max Ernst)
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4Adès: Forgotten Dances: IV. Barcarolle – The Maiden Voyage
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5Adès: Forgotten Dances: V. Carillon de Ville (for Hector Berlioz)
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6Adès: Forgotten Dances: VI. Vesper (for Henry Purcell)
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7Birtwistle: Beyond the White Hand: Construction with Guitar Player
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8Birtwistle: Guitar and White Hand
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9Adès: Habanera from ‘The Exterminating Angel’
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10Birtwistle: Oockooing Bird (arr. Forbes Henderson)
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11Birtwistle: Sleep Song
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12Birtwistle: Berceuse de Jeanne (arr. Forbes Henderson)
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13Birtwistle: Sad Song (arr. Forbes Henderson)
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14Birtwistle: Je sui aussi
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15Dillon: 12 Caprices: 1.
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16Dillon: 12 Caprices: 2.
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17Dillon: 12 Caprices: 3.
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18Dillon: 12 Caprices: 4.
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19Dillon: 12 Caprices: 5.
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20Dillon: 12 Caprices: 6.
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21Dillon: 12 Caprices: 7.
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22Dillon: 12 Caprices: 8.
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23Dillon: 12 Caprices: 9.
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24Dillon: 12 Caprices: 10.
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25Dillon: 12 Caprices: 11.
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26Dillon: 12 Caprices: 12.
Europadisc Review
We rarely review discs of solo guitar music, but the recordings of Sean Shibe – ranging from Bach to music of the 20th and 21st centuries – prove a frequent exception. His latest release on the Pentatone label is a particularly absorbing one. Titled simply ‘Vesper’, it contains recent works by three very different contemporary composers, all non-guitarists themselves (as Bach was with respect to the lute). Most non-player composers who have written music for the instrument have worked in close collaboration with guitarists such as Andrés Segovia and Julian Bream. Yet the three represented here – Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle and James Dillon – nevertheless manage to preserve their distinctive, multi-faceted styles while allowing the guitar, with its unmistakable resonance and wide variety of touches, to bring something extra to their music.
The guitar often goes hand-in-hand with the small-form musical miniature, and Adès’s Forgotten Dances (2023) is a six-movement suite composed of such miniatures. In Jonathan Leathwood’s extensive and detailed booklet notes, Adès talks of a tension between the ‘knots’ of technical obstacles and the ‘living thing’ of the overall compositional ‘image’. This is particularly evident in the opening movement, an Overture subtitled ‘Queen of the Spiders’, as both music and player negotiate the spider’s web which for Adès the guitar brings to mind. From the opening gesture, replete with the open fourths that characterise the instrument’s tuning, to the shimmering delicacy and quivering of the final bars, this is music that draws the listener in like an entrapped fly. That quivering overflows into the following Berceuse, an offshoot of Adès’s 2016 opera The Exterminating Angel.
The lively Courante of the third movement is a tribute to Max Ernst’s 1927 painting Ci-fut une hirondelle (Here was a swallow), although here (appropriately for a fast-moving dance) the bird becomes a swift. Shibe’s astonishing virtuosity is on full display, while in the following Barcarolle (inspired by a trip on the Queen Mary’s maiden voyage undertaken by the composer’s grandmother), it is his sensitive touch that mesmerises the listener. The Carillon de Ville is a tribute to Berlioz (whose only instrument, uniquely among major classical composers, was the guitar), and to the peal of bells next to the Paris Conservatoire where the Symphonie fantastique was premiered; the opening notes do indeed have a bell-like tone to them, and the notes then provide the engine for the movement’s continuation. The suite ends in more pensive mood, its closing movement Vesper based on Purcell’s Evening Hymn over which Adès (and Shibe) weaves dreamily tender counterpoint.
A more direct offshoot from The Exterminating Angel is the surrealist, edgy Habanera, originally for mezzo-soprano and guitar, and excerpted here in a version for guitar alone. Its spiky gestures take us away from the Elizabethan lute associations so often alluded to by English composers for guitar, and into a flamenco world which ends with repeated percussive strums.
The most substantial piece on the disc is a hitherto unrecorded work for solo guitar by the late Harrison Birtwistle. Commissioned by Julian Bream, Beyond the White Hand is an 18-minute work whose various sections are melded into a titanic whole. It is based in part on his earlier Guitar and White Hand, written for Birtwistle’s guitar-playing son Silas and inspired by a 1927 Picasso painting. The second part of Beyond the White Hand’s title – Construction with Guitar Player, proposed by the composer as an alternative title – caused some disagreement between Birtwistle and Bream, before both titles were combined. Birtwistle’s unmistakable penchant for the ritualistic is evident, but so too is his delight in a variety of techniques including hockets and ostinatos. Leathwood’s detailed discussion of the music’s various sections is an enormous help in listening to this ambitious work, while Birtwistle’s tendency to favour the upper and lower extremes of the instrument provides a happy contrast with Adès’s more rounded soundworld.
It is a very different Birtwistle who emerges in a collection of miniatures (some composed for Silas, others originally for piano and arranged by Forbes Henderson) which form one of this album’s most immediately attractive features. Earliest is Oockooing Bird (c.1950), while others inhabit worlds of sleep and melancholy, often bringing to mind the influence of the music of Satie. The latest of these, however, is Je sui aussi, composed in the early 2000s, an engagingly quirky expansion of part of a ballade by Machaut. Shibe displays just as much commitment and virtuosity in these fascinating pieces as he does in the more obviously demanding expanses of Beyond the White Hand. All are valuable additions to the guitar repertoire.
As are the 12 Caprices (2025) by James Dillon which close the disc. Dillon is best known as a member of the so-called ‘New Complexity’ movement, and for his large-scale musical cycles. These Caprices are more concentrated and focused, and for most listeners will be infinitely more accessible. In their concentration and stripping back to musical essentials, they show a kinship with Beethoven’s late Bagatelles, and the minute attention to every gesture and touch by Shibe, so characteristic of the album as a whole, is particularly telling in these works. None are much more than one minute in length, some barely half that, yet each is a miniature jewel.
Shibe plays the Birtwistle miniatures on a unique guitar made by luthier Simon Ambridge and decorated by Lydia Corbett, once Picasso’s model and muse under her birth name Sylvette. The eponymous Sylvette is small-bodied and responsive, suiting the miniatures well, while photographs of it feature in the booklet. It’s an added feature of an unusually engrossing album whose appeal will extend far beyond guitar aficionados.
Reviews
Among the three composers featured (Birtwistle, Adès, James Dillon) Birtwistle offers the starkest sounds in Beyond the White Hand: Construction with Guitar Player: 18 minutes of abstract gestures written as though the guitar was an instrument without a history. The opposite pole is reached with Adès’ Forgotten Dances, a modern variant of the 17th-century baroque suite, excitingly fusing past and present with a panache and sensitivity further enlarged by Shibe’s virtuosity. The album’s final magic ingredient is Pentatone’s excellent recording: wonderfully vivid, warm and clear.The Times
On his new album, Sean Shibe surveys the guitar’s expressive potential through the lens of three British composers. There are interlocking themes here... but this thoughtfully curated programme can be equally enjoyed piece by piece as a series of mind-expanding flights of fancy. ... The revelation for some will be five melodic miniatures by Harrison Birtwistle, three of them piano originals arranged for guitar by Forbes Henderson. ... At more than 18 minutes, Beyond the White Hand is the thorniest music here. Shibe masters its fragmentary architecture... Clive PagetThe Guardian 17 April 2026
The attention to detail in his playing is breathtakingThe Times
... you find yourself marvelling at what Shibe can do with two hands and six strings in the space of one bar – the micro-achievement of his articulation, colouring and mastering of that fragile resonance; the macro-achievement the depths he plumbs, on his instrument, with these miniature stories. Andrew MellorGramophone May 2026
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