Two big tentpole works were the marquee draw at the BBC Proms on Tuesday but looking round the packed Royal Albert Hall, full of youthful music lovers, you could be forgiven for thinking they’d all come to hear the new work by Mark Simpson. In a way they had, but eavesdropping left me in no doubt who had really drawn the crowds. Sean Shibe, the most charismatic guitar virtuoso the UK has produced since Julian Bream (or maybe Eric Clapton, since the Scot bestrides the six-string world like a colossus). Now 33, but still looking closer to 19, Shibe has accrued a loyal retinue of fans. With his dazzling talent he deserves every one of them.
Shibe left his acoustic guitar in its case, for this was to be an electric event in every sense of the word. To give Mark Simpson’s new concerto its tiresomely complete title, ZEBRA (or, 2-3-74: The Divine Invasion of Philip K Dick), ’twas a barrelling thrill ride of auditory possibilities. In the programme I perused Simpson’s mini-treatise on the distinguished Mr Dick, a sci-fi author whose work I too have admired, then set it aside and let his music speak for itself. It’s a guilt-free experience to commune with what we hear rather than what we may have studied as homework – and this sonic spectacular delivered the goods. It was boundary-breaking, accessible and musically coherent.
Given a rock-god welcome by the Proms audience, Shibe joined the BBC Philharmonic under its Chief Guest Conductor Anja Bihlmaier to blow the lid off the RAH with an opening explosion that must have triggered alarms all over SW7. Yet it was never mere noise. However much the orchestra thundered, Shibe’s electric guitar was its equal and together they made Simpson’s score uncoil in patterns of mesmerising sound. Banks of percussion dominated the texture, as did flutter-tongued wind and brass, while thick blocks of tutti chords were squeezed, bent and pitched between major and minor keys, often simultaneously.
From detonation to dénouement, Bihlmaier seemed right at home with Simpson’s idiom and he could not have wished for a classier premiere. That was a relief, because the conductor had previously delivered an oddly pallid account of Richard Strauss's Death and Transfiguration. Her vivid depiction of a serene end to life brought Elgar’s Gerontius to mind, so much so that the timpani thwack with which Strauss shatters that initial mood was enough to wake the dead. Thereafter, however, it was a muted experience. Bihlmaier’s reading lacked vigour and she seemed uncomfortable with the score’s abrupt switches of tone; as a result much of her reading was smoothed out, as though the last thing she wanted was to convey lushness or romance. It was, in short, less an uninhibited Tod und Verklärung than an uninhabited one as she skated over its perceived vulgarities. She is unlikely to tackle Salome any time soon.
Bihlmaier could certainly deliver Les Troyens, though, given the rousing performance of the Symphonie fantastique with which she concluded the concert. She motored through the opening movement with all the élan I'd missed in the Strauss and rekindled a familiar feeling about Berlioz, that he was a composer half a century ahead of his time. And yet, paradoxically, the lengthy central movement, Scène aux champs, has never sounded more like a rustic brother of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. The uglification of the final movement, the Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath, was an ideal peroration. Yes, there were moments of ragged ensemble here and there, but that was not down to the baton-wielder, whose marshalling of the massed forces was exemplary.
