©Photo: Iga Gozdowska

©Photo: Kaupo Kikkas

©Photo: Iga Gozdowska

©Photo: Kaupo Kikkas

©Photo: Iga Gozdowska

Sean Shibe

Guitar/ Electric Guitar

Home
Reviews
Features
Discography

“Shibe’s music-making is masterful, beautiful and convincing in every way”
(The Times, 2020)

One of the most versatile guitarists performing today, Sean Shibe’s innovative approach to his instrument has enhanced his reputation for having “one of the most discriminating ears in the business” (Gramophone). He was the first guitarist ever to be selected for BBC Radio 3’s New Generation Artists scheme, to be awarded a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship and, in 2018, to receive the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Young Artists. Accolades for his recordings include two Gramophone Awards and an Opus Klassik. He is also the 2022 recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award.

Following very successful performances at various summer festivals, this season Shibe gives his New York City solo recital debut at the 92^nd Street Y which is followed by a tour in the US with Quatuor Van Kuijk. During the concert season he performs at Wigmore Hall four times and in solo recitals in Germany at the Konzerthaus Dortmund, Mozartfest Wurzburg, and returns to the Schleswig-Holstein Music festival sharing the stage with tenor Karim Sulayman. He performs with Hallé Orchestra and National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and tours with Manchester Collective in the UK and Europe.

A great admirer of the masterful composers of the past, Shibe is equally committed to new music. Alongside his own transcriptions of Bach’s lute suites and seventeenth century Scottish lute manuscripts, he continues to explore, experiment, and expand the repertoire for his instrument with recent works by Daniel Kidane, David Fennessy, Shiva Feshareki, David Lang, Julia Wolfe and Freya Waley-Cohen. New commissions include a solo work by Thomas Ades, Helen Grime and a new collaboration with Cassandra Miller and Dunedin Consort.

Highlights of the past seasons include two appearances at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival in Summer 2022 working with Krzysztof Urbanski and Christoph Eschenbach and receiving the 2022 Leonard Bernstein Award, a special concert with LUDWIG at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, performances at the East Neuk, Aldeburgh, Norfolk and Norwich Festivals, Southbank Centre in London, Liszt Academy in Budapest, the Alte Oper Frankfurt, Heidelberger-Frühling, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Musashino Hall in Tokyo, and Marlboro Summer Music Festival – the latter at the invitation of Mitsuko Uchida. Recent collaborators include the BBC Singers, Quatuor Van Kuijk, flautist Adam Walker, singers Karim Sulayman, Allan Clayton, Ben Johnson, Robert Murray and Robin Tritschler, and performance artist and art filmmaker Marina Abramović. Shibe was one of the first artists to return to the Wigmore Hall following the Covid-19 lockdown, receiving a five-star review from The Guardian.

His most recent release is a second album for Pentatone titled Lost & Found, recorded on electric guitar and featuring repertoire by Hildegard von Bingen, Olivier Messiaen, Moondog, Julius Eastman, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Meredith Monk, Shiva Feshareki, Oliver Leith and Daniel Kidane. His Pentatone debut album Camino (2021) featured an introspective programme of French and Iberian music. The album was named Recording of the Month by BBC Music Magazine as well the Recording of the Week by The Guardian, Presto Classical, and The Times describing it as “one of the most compelling and touching recitals for the instrument I can recall”. The recent releases on Pentatone follow a string of successes on Delphian Records receiving many prestigious awards. With the laconically titled Bach (2020), a chart-topping recording of Bach lute suites arranged for guitar, Shibe received the Gramophone Award in the Instrumental Category and became the cover star of Gramophone Magazine’s June 2020 issue in which the disc was named Editor’s Choice.

Born in Edinburgh in 1992 of English and Japanese heritage, Shibe studied under Allan Neave at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and Paolo Pegoraro in Italy. Shibe currently holds a teaching position at University of the Arts Bremen.

HarrisonParrott represents Sean Shibe for worldwide general management.

Sean Shibe plays the world premiere of Daniel Kidane’s Haze © Barbican, 2021

Mompou's Coral - Guitarist Sean Shibe © PENTATONE

Tweedsyde at Balcarres House © East Neuk Festival, Stuart Armitt/ Video and Phil Hobbs/ Sound

‘Rosewoods for Solo Guitar and Strings’ with Sean Shibe and the Irish Chamber Orchestra © Irish Chamber Orchestra

Sean Shibe / Steve Reich, Electric Counterpoint for electric guitar and tape at Wigmore Hall BBC Radio 3 June 2020 Special Broadcast series © Wigmore Hall, 2020

Sean Shibe / J.S. Bach, Lute Suite in E Minor BWV996, mov I-III at Wigmore Hall BBC Radio 3 June 2020 Special Broadcast series © Wigmore Hall

Sean Shibe / Attaingnant, Basse Dance La Magdalena (1530) @ Baroque at the Edge © Apple and Biscuit Recordings 2020

Green Room Session with Sean Shibe © Wigmore Hall

Sean Shibe – excerpt from Vivaldi: Concerto for Guitar and Strings in D major RV 93, Largo © Classic FM

“Shibe’s own arrangement of Julius Eastman’s Buddha […] was the final reinforcement of this musician’s creative imagination.”

Rian Evans for The Guardian, May 2023

“Shibe’s performance was mesmerising… Their conviction was infectious.”

Ken Walton for The Scotsman, April 2023

“Shibe took us on a journey from the grotesque through melancholy to an ambiguous calm and performed […] with an introspection so powerful it left the audience in rapt silence after the final notes.”

Scott Cmiel for San Francisco Classical Voice, February 2023

“Shibe can shred, but more often he makes the instrument as featherlight as an angel’s wing.”

Tom Huizenga, Nashville Classical Radio, December 2022

“Another bonkers-at-first-glance, brilliantly curated album from the guitarist Sean Shibe.”

Erica Jeal on ‘Lost & Found’ for The Guardian, August 2022

“Lost & Found is a beguiling album, where music of innocence and experience interlace. And where a masterful, mercurial artist, compels us to question what a “classical guitarist” should sound like in 2022.”

Tom Huizenga for NPR Music, August 2022

“The best ever Bach recording of [guitar] … There seems to be no limit to Shibe’s characterful melodic instincts, with flourishes of rolling arpeggiations, exquisite harmonic placements and all kinds of textural delights. … the most interesting voice on the guitar for a generation”

(Gramophone, October 2021)

“one of the most compelling and touching recitals for the instrument I can recall”

(The Times, August 2021)

“All this perfectly suits Shibe’s great gift for painting notes in what seems a thousand colours, with multiple dynamic shadings en route. ..there are exquisite and tender sounds everywhere you look”

(Geoff Brown, The Times 5*, August 2021)

“It’s a beautifully intimate recording, full of playing that is as far from classical-guitar cliche .. full of big, bold gestures and soft, subtle shifts in colour. All the transitions from piece to piece, key to key, have been similarly meticulously thought through – but what’s really striking is the way in which Shibe sustains a world of intensity and introspection through playing that buzzes with vitality. The attention to detail in his playing is breathtaking; nothing interrupts the flow of the music, and nothing is done purely for effect.”

(Erica Jeal, The Guardian 5*, August 2021)

“Shibe’s ability to command a wide dynamic range within a relatively restricted compass naturally comes to the fore. .. a release that considerably enhances Shibe’s reputation for having one of the most discriminating ears in the business.”

(Gramophone, August 2021)

“Shibe’s playing in this warhorse was superlative…There was rhythmic exactitude across metallic, gutsy passagework in the first movement…Most remarkable, perhaps, was the featherlight touch and whisper quiet of the second movement’s cadenza… In the final movement he was rugged and playfully astringent, navigating Rodrigo’s rhythmic games with élan.”

(Bachtrack, June 2021)

“The greatest performers always push the boundaries, and that 28-year-old Sean Shibe […] is already in their select company. The spell, as always with Shibe, was total; no other guitarist that I know of is working at this artistic level.”

(The Arts Desk, 2020)

“…there’s no doubting that he himself is an artist blessed with grace to spare, and a roar that is fearsome”

(5*, BBC Music Magazine, Instrumental Choice, 2020)

“SoftLOUD is a gripping recital from guitarist Sean Shibe, dealing in extremes – I suspect his beautifully touched-in accounts of pieces from 17^th-century Scottish manuscripts will get more living-room plays than Julia Wolfe’s LAD, an abrasive electric-guitar scream originally conceived for nine bagpipes. In between, he also supplies a definitive performance of Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint.”

(The Guardian, 2018)

“Shibe imbues the early Scottish lute pieces with a profoundly moving intensity that carries them far beyond their modest frames, through to the MacMillan arrangements, themselves as much transitions from the old to the new as Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, which seems to gather the previous works in a boppy afterparty. Then they are torn apart in Julia Wolfe’s LAD, a searing siren song of lamentation originally for nine bagpipes. And Lang’s explosive Killer, originally for electric violin. But try listening to ‘softLOUD’ in reverse order, and remember Britten’s Nocturnal.”

(Gramophone, 2018)

“A word of warning: in these desolate stretches, Sean Shibe may steal your heart with his guitar solo.”

(Gramophone Magazine, 2018)

“This is the best solo guitar disc I’ve heard.”

(The Arts Desk, 2017)