Music for Guitar by Harrison Birtwistle, Thomas Adès and James Dillon. Sean Shibe, guitar. Pentatone. $18.75.
Pluto Bell: A Moment or Two; Nicholas Deyoe: Lullaby; Scott Wollschleger: trace-escape-horizon. Michael Jones, percussion. New Focus Recordings. $20.99.
Guitar music by non-guitarists has the potential, like music written for other instruments by composers who do not play those instruments, to present significant interpretative difficulties for performers – but is equally likely to provide unexpected insights into the instrument’s evocative and technical capabilities. All these elements are present in Sean Shibe’s recital of never-before-recorded 21st-century guitar works on the Pentatone label. Harrison Birtwistle (1934-2022) took suggestions for Beyond the White Hand: Construction with Guitar Player (2014) from his good friend, master guitarist Julian Bream, much as other composers have requested ideas for their works from virtuoso performers. But also like earlier composers, Birtwistle did not accept all of Bream’s ideas, utilizing only ones that he felt would enhance what Birtwistle as composer was trying to express. This piece is the most-extended work on the CD, and it explores a very large variety of guitar expressions and technical challenges. It is essentially a fantasia, with wide-ranging explorations of moods and forms that all derive, ultimately, from a short piece that Birtwistle had written previously, Guitar and White Hand – a work, based on a Picasso painting, that is also recorded here and that provides an intriguing chance to hear the foundation of a much grander musical edifice. Shibe explores these pieces, both longer and shorter, with sure-handed skill and respect for the multiplicity of moods and wide-ranging use of the guitar (including as a percussion instrument) that Birtwistle requires. Five Birtwistle miniatures supplement and complement the “white hand” material: Sleep Song, Je sui aussi, and three pieces arranged for guitar by Forbes Henderson – Oockooing Bird, Berceuse de Jeanne, and Sad Song. These are thoughtful and introspective works, all but the moderate-tempo Je sui aussi being slow-paced. Shibe dwells lovingly on their quiet warmth and overall sense of restfulness, and if they are somewhat emotionally monochromatic, they do contrast nicely with the more-expansive and wide-ranging “white hand” material. In their turn, the two pieces here by Thomas Adès (born 1971) contrast well with Birtwistle’s. Adès Forgotten Dances (2023) is a set of six movements: Overture, Berceuse, Courante, Barcarolle, Carillon de Ville, and Vesper. The resemblance to a Baroque suite is clear and intentional, but there is more here, with each movement bearing either a subtitle or, in the case of the third, fifth and sixth, a reference to an earlier composer (Max Ernst, Hector Berlioz and Henry Purcell, respectively). These dance forms are of course not forgotten so much as neglected, at least as dances: they are familiar enough to audiences accustomed to Baroque music so that Adès’ handling of them as guitar pieces will be intriguing. They do not in fact sit particularly well on the instrument, requiring Shibe to cope with high harmonics, to extend (or seem to extend) the guitar’s range, to make a single guitar sound like two, and otherwise to exploit as well as explore the instrument’s capabilities. They have more sense of experimentation than rhythmic danceability about them, being draped in a kind of intellectual garment that makes them perhaps more suitable for guitarists’ listening pleasure than for that of a more-general audience. The Berceuse, for example, is quite different from Birtwistle’s Berceuse de Jeanne: Adès’ is scarcely restful, being harmonically unsettled and lullaby-like only in the very general sense of its tempo – which, however, varies quite a bit. Shibe is respectful throughout of Adès’ methods and aims, handling Forgotten Dances as a frequently challenging exploration of sonorities. Separately, Shibe offers a kind of palate cleanser by Adès: Habanera from “The Exterminating Angel” (2016), which shares with the dance-based suite a penchant for ignoring the expected rhythm of its designated name but which is in some ways more interesting than the elements of Forgotten Dances because of its strong contrasts of volume as well as technique. The arrangement of the CD is an odd one – grouping the composers’ works would have been more congenial than presenting them as is done here, in the sequence Adès-Birtwistle-Adès-Birtwistle – but the disc eventually makes its way to a single piece by a third composer. This is 12 Caprices (2025) by James Dillon (born 1950). These zip by in a total of only 10½ minutes, producing a sense of epigrammatic micro-miniaturization, with each little piece offering a sound snippet and then disappearing. Intellectually interesting if never emotionally engaging, they offer a clear contrast to the more-expansive material from Birtwistle and Adès and give Shibe further chances to show his solicitous handling of composers’ very different approaches to the guitar. The CD is really for guitar fanciers (and players) rather than a general audience – nothing on it bears repeated hearings for strictly musical-enjoyment purposes – but it stands as a convincing example of the different ways guitar music is being composed in the 21st century and of the skill that Shibe brings to his performances of it.
Lullaby and lullaby-like music attracts quite a few contemporary composers, including some who create music for instruments not usually associated with restfulness. The guitar may have a clear ability to enhance relaxation, but one would not expect that to be the case for a percussion complement. But Nicholas Deyoe seeks to provide quietude through percussion in Lullaby (2011), an extended (12½ -minute) sonic exploration using drums, wood blocks, glockenspiel and cymbals. As performed by Michael Jones on a New Focus Recordings release, the work is suitably restrained and played with attention to some unusual elements in its scoring, notably the use of the drums to provide melodic material. The fact that the piece goes on and on contributes to its intentionally soporific nature, and like the guitar works played by Sean Shibe, Deyoe’s seems to be directed more at performers than at a general listening audience. Indeed, that is the case for all three solo-percussionist works that Jones plays: Deyoe’s is actually the shortest of them. Pluto Bell’s A Moment or Two (2021) runs nearly 14 minutes and explores pitched percussion of various types: bells, bowls, bars (of a glockenspiel) and more. It is a textural rather than melodic or harmonic work, inviting listeners to engage with subtle distinctions in sound production and sound quality – matters likely of considerable interest to Jones’ fellow percussionists if not necessarily to a broader set of listeners. But neither Bell’s piece nor Deyoe’s demands as much attention and involvement as Scott Wollschleger’s trace-escape-horizon (2023-2024), one of those avant-garde works whose composer seems to think the elimination of capital letters in the title is somehow meaningful. This is an exceptionally extended piece, lasting more than 36 minutes, yet like much minimalist music of the Philip Glass type, it is hypnotic by intent rather than exploratory of sonorities, melodies or harmonies. Everything Wollschleger does is handled with economy of sound and unwillingness to allow the instruments to produce extended passages of clear interrelatedness. Instead, there are sections devoted to trills, oscillations, pitch suspension, and, probably inevitably, white noise; the result is a generalized and perpetual feeling of stasis within a floating soundcloud. Percussion tends to be thought of as emphatic even when not particularly loud, but Wollschleger seems determined to go against type by requiring mostly gentle, soft, subtly intertwined sound production that takes Ligeti-style “interstellar” music several steps beyond, into a realm of perpetual evanescence. As delicate background material, trace-escape-horizon seems to have a function to fulfill, but it is as difficult for non-performers to listen to attentively as it would be for a performer to focus for its very extended duration on the miniscule modifications of aural quality that it demands throughout. Jones manages the tiny intricacies of the work, and the requirements of the other pieces on the disc, with unerring and unending skill, but to what non-performative end is unlikely to be clear to anybody encountering these pieces from a perspective other than that of a committed percussion player.
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