Masterly Boulez from Sean Shibe and friends at the BBC Proms in Gateshead

In the programme to this afternoon Prom at the Glasshouse came a reminder of Sean Shibe’s concert philosophy: “Fundamentally, I want to create programmes that I would want to go and listen to.”  To judge by the capacity crowd in Sage 2, many of us shared his vision.

Silent and intense, the guitarist almost crouched in front of us to play James Dillon’s 12 Caprices, inspired by a fragment of Garcia Lorca’s verse. These were ethereal miniatures, sounds seeming to materialise out of thin air as if snatched from wandering spirits, sometimes illuminating the physical distance between notes and chords, sometimes addressing the silences of varying durations between them. Shibe seemed to inhabit these pieces personally, as if sharing their expression from within his own soul. 

The rest of the ensemble, excepting percussion, joined the guitarist for the Proms premiere of Cassandra Miller’s Bel Canto, an exploration of the changing direction in Maria Callas’ performances of Puccini’s “Vissi d’arte” over her career. The work focuses in particular on Callas’ vibrato and how this slowed and broadened with the passing years. Ema Nikolovska dramatically illustrated this, her beautiful intonation perhaps a little too perfect to suggest Callas, while the instrumentalists played an endless sequence of descending glissandi behind her, sounding like the declining wail of an air-raid siren in a derelict wasteland. 

After the interval, the full ensemble played Boulez’ Le Marteau sans maître. First performed in 1955, this iconoclastic piece, based on surrealistic poetry by René Char, defied musicologists’ analysis for a further 22 years. It was finally decoded by Russian academic Lev Koblyakov in 1977, although Boulez himself has said that he has no particular wish to explain the music (with the exception of a lengthy analytical comparison between Le Marteau and Schönberg’s Pierrot lunaire) leaving us with the tantalising clue that “the last piece alone provides a sort of solution or ‘key’ to the maze.”

Shibe and the ensemble made a vivid and deeply affecting exploration of the work under the calmly forensic direction of Alphonse Cemin. They brought a welcome clarity to the relationships between Nikolovska’s mesmerising vocal contributions and the assured, stylish playing of the individual instrumentalists, perhaps bearing in mind Stravinsky’s dictum that “One follows the line of only a single instrument and is content to be ‘aware of’ the others... one mustn't try to hear them in the tonal-harmonic sense.”