IDAGIO Meets
IDAGIO Meets ... Sean Shibe
Tell us a little about your latest album Profesión. How did the album come about?
I first worked on the repertoire about ten years ago, so it’s been sitting with me for a long time. I think that sometimes when I've been thinking about what to record or thinking about what is speaking to me at that point, often I've gone out of my way to work on things that are slightly more obscure. Or it’s more that it just happens that things I'm interested in at a certain time might be things that don’t originally work on the guitar, like arrangements of minimalist pieces or that kind of thing. I guess because I pick quite specific directions sometimes, people might think, “Oh he’s only doing the weird stuff!” The reality is that when I was younger, more traditional stuff didn't really interest me, but then I realised that I liked both of these things and they really complement each other. The schooling that we have in the 19th century repertoire on the guitar is something that is inescapable and in fact, has a lot of merit! So the idea of approaching music that has been originally written for the guitar, that sums up what the guitar looked like, what it meant to South America in the 20th century, is not at odds with what I see my career as being. It’s actually integral! This was a programme that I wanted to bring together for a long time, I was just searching for the right moment to make that happen because it is all terrifically difficult music to play.
And the pieces for this programme – were they all obvious choices for you and it just fell into place?
It was actually obvious to me – it felt like these were in some ways the works that summed up the composers’ “ideology”: Barrios working with a combination of Western influences but also being essentially an indigenous person who was inextricably linked to the people of his homeland. Villa-Lobos’ work again is a synthesis of traditional references to Chopin, Rachmaninoff, many composers of his period and before, but also combining it with something earthy and of Brazil in a more ancient way. Because I took the Twelve Etudes as a starting point, I was thinking about where they begin with these Western references, and where they go, which is actually a hyper-developed form that Villa-Lobos created. I was thinking about which works from Ginastera and Barrios could emphasise this journey. La Catedral which is so specifically romantic but also with a Bachian origin and Julia Florida which is Barrios at his most Chopin-esque linking to the first etude of Villa-Lobos would provide that beginning foil to the programme. Then when Villa-Lobos does this impossibly organic and complicated thing of taking us through that journey over the Twelve Etudes to something much more violent and extreme, it’s followed by Ginastera’s sonata, which is also sitting as the synthesis of his musical exploration and of his three main musical styles. That seemed like the perfect end, to come from something so quiet to something so actually catastrophic.
That’s interesting because there are different arcs in the programme: one is a chronology, the album starts with the oldest work and ends with the newest; another one, like you just said, is built around the Twelve Etudes as the centrepiece of the programme. Could you tell us more about that work, because it’s so amazing and many-sided…
Yeah, exactly. Villa-Lobos composed a lot of music and not all of it is good – and that’s fine! I'd say that the Twelve Etudes is not his most consistent work either, there are pieces in it that are less strong. But what I think is remarkable about it is this journey. In no other work does he begin with something so conservative and result in something so anti-conservative. And I think that’s almost his most compelling characteristic, that he was able to create this thing and sum it up in a thirty minute journey. But one could argue that the Five Preludes for guitar which he wrote slightly later are a better suite, as it were. Putting aside compositionally the Twelve Etudes, another aspect of it is dealing with the weight of the West in South America. The weight of Empire, tradition and of course Segovia, who probably had some kind of mixed relationship towards Barrios; whether he was just accidentally neglectful or deliberately, who knows. But I think to sum up the interactions that we know he had with Barrios, there was a great deal of deference that Barrios felt towards Segovia, which continues pretty much with Villa-Lobos. I guess Ginastera is removed from that in that his Sonata is music that Segovia was not going to play, that he was probably not going to be interested in and that actually was probably also too difficult for Segovia at that point in time, as he would have been older as well. It’s a work that I think, like the Nocturnal, people took ten years to really come to and start performing in earnest because it was so challenging for its own period. So there’s also the inspection of this character, of Segovia, and of the imperial critique.
From the booklet it becomes clear that the dynamic of the composer/performer relationship is something that runs through this album. Can you unpack that a little more, also maybe from your own experience or is it really about this specific point in time where that dynamic becomes so symbolic for something bigger?
This was the point at which it was starting to diverge, guitarist-composers were becoming more separate: Segovia is somebody who hardly composed and Barrios obviously we know more as a composer than as a guitarist. But I guess what is interesting to me from the contemporary lens is that when we work with composers on new pieces, it’s very different. A piece that I’m touring a lot at the moment is Forgotten Dances by Thomas Adès. We worked a lot on that in the summer of last year, putting it together from all the sketches and ideas that he had and collaborating very heavily on understanding: how does this instrument work? How does this strange object get tackled? We’ve come away with something which I think is really successful. Segovia would just write to somebody and say, “Can I have this piece?” and they’d just deliver it. I guess that’s because a lot of them played the guitar but I get the sense that there was less of that in-person collaboration between two equals, because Segovia was such a patriarch of his fiefdom. Which is, I guess, a characteristic that I find interesting but it’s so anachronistic – we would never think of tackling it in that way, I think. I hope! To me these things are much more about the relationships you want to build, I think that’s where the best music comes from: the piece is a way into the person which is then about creating this thing together that works for everybody. Sometimes I look at the scores of Segovia’s editions and he’s crossed out a couple of lines in a piece that a composer sent him or something like that – can you imagine a composer delivering a piece and you just crossing out a couple of lines and being like, “I don’t think that’s very…”? [laughs]
Yes, it’s very special! And you’ve touched on the fact now that there’s also the tension of the “Old World” and the “New World” at that time – I wonder if you could dive a little deeper into your own relationship with South America?
South American music occupies such a prominent position in the repertoire for the classical guitar, second only to Spanish music. I guess the guitar is the way in. The guitar is the object that sums up South American music at that time. I keep on thinking of how Ginastera used the open strings of the guitar in so many different pieces: in his orchestral ostinati or his Harp Concerto for instance. Only at the last point does it come home to the original point but it shows that the guitar is almost inextricable from certain aspects of South American musical culture.
You also write that in the music there is a development towards “magical realism” and I understand it’s not just a direct reference to García Márquez but that it signifies something more for you. Could you dive into that a little?
I think what’s so cool about this music is that it’s like things just happen and you don’t quite know why but they’re very beautiful and they create a tapestry that is believable. At the midpoint of the Twelve Etudes you start to hear these shimmering effects and by No. 10 there’s the sound of rainfall, there’s distant drumming in No. 11 and No. 12. It’s becoming steadily more arcane but kind of inexplicably so. When we come to Ginastera, I think it’s just so special that we’re now thoroughly in the rainforest with the Quechua people but there are these mad hallucinations of ghosts, of Sixtus Beckmesser and Beethoven. So there is a hallucinatory and kind of decadent aspect to it as well. It’s very sensual music, and despite its decadence there is also a sort of purity to it, I feel.
In the booklet you write of the guitar as a “shamanic conduit.” That’s such an evocative image and such an interesting way to think of the guitar in that cultural context…
Yeah, I was thinking about that specifically with reference to Barrios and his poems. He’d talk about how the guitar was this – as it was for Ginastera, two very different composers but ultimately thinking of it in a linked way – that the guitar was this divine construct, a sort of portal.
You’ve touched on the poetry, now could you tell us a little more about the album title, because there’s a bit of a history there, right?
Right, there is! Barrios would preface his concerts with poems and there was one that he would even read out called Profession of Faith, Profesión de Fe. And he was talking about Tupá, the god of gods, the protector of his people who in a dream presented the mysterious box to Barrios. “And enclosing within it all the songs of the birds of the jungle and the mournful signs of the plants.” In a way this poem is the epitome of the programme. Barrios probably occupies the smallest minute count of the three composers on the album but somehow conceptually he sums it up in a very succinct way: I think this poem speaks not only for Barrios but also the other two composers. “From the bottom of the mysterious box came forth a marvellous symphony of all the virgin voices of America.” So good!
And the magical box is the guitar, right?
Exactly, it was explicitly the guitar. There’s lots of extremely florid turns of phrase that he uses to describe the instrument which are very good for someone who wants to come up with an album title!
So speaking about the instrument a little more: on your previous solo album, Lost & Found, you played electric guitar, now you’ve returned to the acoustic. Can you talk a little bit about how your approach changes – if it does – depending on whether you play an acoustic or electric guitar?
There are composers and there are pieces of music which don’t fit onto the classical guitar, and there are definitely composers I’ve spoken to who actually don’t really want to write for the classical guitar, they really want to write for the electric guitar. And vice versa. That’s been a super liberating, amazing musical discovery for the composers and for myself. I think it speaks to a general difference in the instruments: between the lute and the classical guitar, musically what they do is quite similar – more similar than the proximity musically of the electric guitar and the classical guitar, which provide very different things. But that said, the electric guitar technique and the classical guitar technique are more similar than what you have to do to be able to learn the lute. There’s the fingernail issue, there are plucking angle issues – essentially there is more transferability between the classical guitar and the electric guitar than between the lute and the classical guitar. So more bang for your buck in terms of learning time! It has meant of course that I can construct programmes that are very specific and would not be possible on the classical guitar, things like Lost and Found, the album that you mentioned. I think it’s made me slightly more of a geek in terms of instrument choices. There are a few instruments and effects for the electric guitar projects that have worked really well and I’ve been experimenting with different sounds and approaches instrumentation-wise. When it came to this album, Profesión, I'd been working with this instrument built by Simon Ambridge which previously belonged to Julian Bream. It’s a very beautiful Hauser copy – very lightly built, very low body resonance. I'd been playing it for a couple of years and I just said to him, "Can I hang on to it for another couple of months?" as he was just lending it to me. And he was like, "Yeah just hold on to it," because I'd been working on this repertoire on that instrument. So it’s also about that little journey I had with that mysterious box. Now I'm playing a new one and I'm very happy with that, but this instrument is also a copy of the guitars from that period, a 1930s, ‘40s German-built guitar which itself was sort of a Bavarian variation on the Torres guitar of the 1880s and 1890s.
I suppose with that kind of physical and virtuosic repertoire, the personality of the instrument would play a big role or is it just a matter of getting used to a specific instrument?
It’s a bit of both. The instruments have a lot of personality, a very specific sound. Very honest. Segovia would describe them as “noble” instruments – which I think is a silly term, but yeah, they’re slightly older guitars. Contemporary guitars are slightly more pianistic and guitars that are older, the 1880s instruments, are slightly more lyrical, slightly more vocally led.
What do you hope people will take away from the new album?
I hope that what they take away is that South America has so much more to offer than the milonga or the traditionally “easy listening” or “fun” aspects. There’s actually a very dark and primal experience to be had there, one that deals with the legacy of Empire. But I also hope that beyond that slightly more probing analysis, they would also feel that this is music that is highly sophisticated and virtuosic in a way that they hadn’t expected. It’s not easy going music: it’s very, very trying and complicated. So yeah, I hope that they’d be slightly amazed by what South America has to offer as well!
Can you tell us anything about what’s next? Do you have plans for future recordings?
Well, Thomas [Adès] has written this piece and I think that needs to be recorded. I’m not totally sure yet, but there are a couple of possibilities for this year. I’m hoping to release an album next year that is probably going to be concerto based. Cassandra Miller has written me a guitar concerto, she’s a canadian composer, and the concerto is based on bagpipe music. I’m touring that with the Dunedin Consort around Europe and with the Australian Chamber Orchestra in Australia before going on to the States next year.