Meet the guitar hero going electric at the Proms

Times

6 days ago

Sean Shibe is one of the most outrageously talented guitarists of the classical music world, able to bridge the divide between electric and acoustic. But that didn't stop some of his audience walking out when he played a 60-minute solo at the Wigmore Hall in 2020.
They had been warned: the composer Georges Lentz's Ingwe is meant to be played 'painfully loud'. People wore brightly coloured earplugs. Shibe wore a hot-pink jumpsuit. But London's foremost classical recital space is more accustomed to a Wagner transcription than a wah-wah pedal, and as the music grew, so did the number of empty seats. The reviews, however, were raves: five stars from The Times, for a performance that induced 'a state of near-nauseous confusion mixed with cathartic ecstasy'.
For the past decade Shibe has been transforming artistic expectations of the electric guitar. 'Classical guitarists are used to dealing with an instrument where the lightness is its power,' he explains. 'When it comes to the electric guitar the opposite is true — you can add distortion, reverb, whammy bar.' Crucially, you can also be heard above an orchestra.
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Such effects are largely unknown in classical music — something Shibe says composers find liberating. His second album, softLOUD, which drew on music first written for Scottish lute and bagpipe, blasted open a new path for classical guitar music. Plenty of guitarists had proved the acoustic instrument could reach beyond its classical soundworld; some, like the jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, have made a compelling case for its amplified sister. But until Shibe no one was doing both. As well as electric guitar he is capable of performing the most light-fingered work from the baroque era.
Born in Edinburgh in 1992, Shibe took up the guitar after his mother, a Japanese ceramicist, picked up an inexpensive instrument from a shop near the pottery studio she runs with her husband. His progress was swift. Having been the only guitar student at the City of Edinburgh Music School, he moved to Aberdeen City Music School, going on to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and becoming, at 19, its youngest graduate.
At next week's BBC Proms he will perform a new concerto for electric guitar by Mark Simpson, titled ZEBRA (or, 2-3-74: The Divine Invasion of Philip K Dick). Simpson, the composer of an acclaimed violin concerto championed by Nicola Benedetti, was inspired by the sci-fi writer whose books became Hollywood blockbusters such as Minority Report and Blade Runner — even if, Shibe points out, 'Dick's own take was often more gritty, paranoid and hallucinatory'. In 1974 the author attributed a series of visions — featuring Jesus, pink light and ancient Rome — to a spiritual source he referred to as 'Zebra'.
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Shibe is full of praise for the composer, who has also added a drum kit and synthesizer. 'It takes somebody like Mark to recalibrate the expectations we have of the instrument for it to function alongside a symphony orchestra [in this case the BBC Philharmonic and the conductor Anja Bihlmaier]. There are a lot of pieces that introduce the guitar to the orchestra in a hackneyed way.' Shibe cites Yngwie Malmsteen's 1998 Concerto Suite for Electric Guitar and Orchestra in E flat minor as an example.
'If you're a hypertonal pop musician you can't necessarily play a concerto — and I probably couldn't be in a rock band,' Shibe says. One rare exception is Jonny Greenwood, the Radiohead guitarist who has composed for the Proms and, like Shibe, recorded Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint. 'There are very few Jonny Greenwoods,' Shibe says. True, but there might be even fewer Shibes.
A week after the concerto Shibe is the face of one of the BBC Proms excursions to Gateshead — the concert is dubbed 'Sean Shibe and Friends' — in which he will play James Dillon's 12 Caprices in Gateshead. I saw him perform them at the Aldeburgh Festival a few weeks ago, where the sparse melodies held the room transfixed — until we were all jolted back to earth by a message alert. It seemed to come from Shibe's iPad, though he vehemently denies this. In the end it didn't matter: his subsequent performance of Le Marteau sans maître – Boulez's 1955 setting of René Char's surrealist poetry — was far more memorable, folding in and out of itself as the patterns become increasingly complex.
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Headlines involving Shibe inevitably invoke the Noughties video game Guitar Hero, in which players mimic rock solos via a console. In September he will open a residency at the Southbank Centre in London with Oliver Leith's Doom and the Dooms, a composition for electric guitar, keyboard, percussion and strings, in which the guitarist performs a concert as part of the titular band — only recast in a classical format.
'It's more of a woozy memory of a rock band,' Shibe says of a style that recalls Leith's opera Last Days, which depicted the last days of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain. He'll also perform music by Bach, Thomas Adès and Reich, plus Rodrigo's Aranjuez concerto — a touchstone of the classical repertoire — with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Marin Alsop. His autumn hit list also includes a London Symphony Orchestra performance (Oct 19) conducted by Adès, of Poul Ruders's Paganini Variations. It's the full menu of a modern virtuoso — or a bona fide guitar hero.
Sean Shibe performs at the BBC Proms on Jul 22 (Royal Albert Hall, London) and Jul 27 (Glasshouse, Gateshead). Both concerts are live on Radio 3/BBC Sounds