SCOTLAND UNBOUND
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Monday November 11, 2024
Sean Shibe
To shut up its Brisbane shop for 2024, the ACO went all Hibernian on us, showcasing the talents of Scot-Japanese guitarist Sean Shibe. The visitor began on your normal everyday guitar – Spanish or acoustic or classical – treating us to a Scottish lute solo extracted from an early 17th century collection and ended the night on electric guitar with selections from rock musician Martyn Bennett‘s Bothy Culture album of 1997. Between the two, the guest played a couple of vignettes, a guitar concerto from Canada and a sort of aural rort by American composer Julia Wolfe.
In all of this, the arranging hand of James Crabb loomed large. The Scottish accordionist/friend of the ACO was responsible for the three orchestra-alone efforts in the night’s first half, as well as arranging the Wolfe and Bennett works for guitar and strings. Indeed, arrangements were all the go on this occasion, Shibe himself transcribing the initial lute piece, an impossible-to-trace George Duthie responsible for a guitar-plus-strings arrangement of James MacMillan‘s From Galloway bagatelle, and Crabb again putting his talents to the service of another guitar/strings transcription, this time a version of Friedemann Stickle’s Da Trowie Burn.
Much of this program’s initial content proved easy enough to take in. From this showing, Shibe is not promoting the last word in Scottish musical modernity as a good deal of his native-made material was folk music or indebted to that branch of the art. The initial A Scots Tune proved amiable enough, a solo to concentrate focus, even if its later stages sounded harmonically suspect for the period, preparing us for the wry mini-dissonances of MacMillan’s brevity which was originally a piece for solo clarinet, complete with quickly arpeggiated chords. It’s a slow-moving lyric with a moody ambience that unfolded gently enough, without raising any stress levels in participants or audience.
The possibly/probably non-existent Stickle left behind a quietly atmospheric melody in Da Trowie Burn, the main interest in this Crabb setting lying in its occasional hemiolas. Shibe and the ACO made this arrangement into a mildly interesting conclusion to the guitarist’s opening round of activity but it re-activated the perennial problem of what to do with a folk tune once you’ve played it; unless a singer is involved. There’s precious little, except to repeat with elaborations. Still, this introductory gambit left you impressed with the guitarist’s restraint and ability to establish his homeland’s musical traits.
Speaking of perennials, ACO artistic director Richard Tognetti then led his ensemble through three Crabb arrangements, the first named Ossian by Victorian-Edwardian fiddler James Scott Skinner. Most of us would subscribe to the theory that Ossian was a fictional poet and a few of us might believe that Skinner was happy to trade on the legend. His original melody follows the melancholy path already set up in this program with its only distinction an un-flattened leading note; I can’t remember if Crabb followed this peculiarity.
The next piece, Niel Gow’s Lament for the Death of his Second Wife (by the eponymous lamenter) gave us a very well-known Scots melody but, by the time Crabb’s changes had finished ringing on it, I’d had enough. Certainly the tune is expressive in its rising, falling and fluency, but it came in a chain of folksy products and I, for one, grew impatient with the Robbie Burns’ quaintness that had prevailed for about a quarter of an hour so far. Which is not to say that the performances were under par; just that a lot of it sounded . . . well, unremarkable. Even the final part of this ACO-only trilogy, the traditional Shaun Robertson’s Rant, resurrected from Tognetti’s music for the 2003 Master and Commander film, raised the temperature only slightly, until the strathspey turned into a reel imported from Northumbria and a rush of blood raised expectations before the evening’s major element.
Cassandra Miller wrote her Chanter guitar concerto for Shibe. It’s based in part on the sound of his singing, and then somehow singing in his sleep – all the time following the lead (live or recorded, I don’t know) of smallpipes player Brighde Chaimbeul. Miller points to the chanter of her title as that part of the bagpipes that changes the instrument’s notes, the recorder-like attachment that sticks out of the bottom of the bag/wind-sack. I’m assuming that Shibe’s singing and sleep-singing bear on the chanter’s melodic potentialities in some way.
You might be able to trace the work’s five sections if you could rouse yourself from the trance that Miller wishes to establish. No problems with the first section, Rippling, but then the divisions became blurred, possibly distinguished by the upward or downward motifs that were articulated at great length by both soloist and strings. So we moved unknowing through Bellow-breathing, Sleep-chanting, and Slowing Air before coming to the change in character that heralded the coda, Honey-dreaming. Nothing disturbs the placidity of the score’s central parts where the repetitions are mind-numbing. For those of us not given to satisfaction with seemingly endless mantras, Chanter became irritating when you (I) started wishing for a change in timbre or pulse..
But I can’t improve on the observation of my neighbour at the end of it all. As we filed out of the Concert Hall doors in something like a communal daze, she muttered, ‘It does go on a bit.’ To which I felt like shouting, ‘A BIT?’ Perhaps, with another hearing, I might find subtleties of delivery in Shibe’s solo line, or shades of timbre in the string orchestral backdrop. There may be closely devised alterations in the movements’ rhythmic structures, or unremarked harmonic deviations across the general fabric. On the other hand, it’s more probable that what you hear is what you get.
After interval, Shibe returned for Wolfe’s Lad; like Miller’s concerto, it is enjoying Australian premiere performances across this tour. Originally composed for nine bagpipes, the work is an angry contemporary three-movement tombeau for the death of a friend. It begins with (Drones) which presents exactly those, verging in and out of a minor 2nd, expanding to an upward-moving scale with the use of rapid in-your-own-time glissandi to colour the melange. To 3end (I think), we move back to a unison, strung out to great length.
I missed the changeover to The Slow Melody which somehow emanated from (Drones); possibly this segment arrived with the scalar motion mentioned earlier. Still, we all were aware of The Fast Melody which was couched in what sounded like a 6/8 rhythm and shared in the biting rage that typified the work’s opening. You take the point that the composer is aiming at a bagpipes imitation in this final quick section, noticeably in the strings’ activity. Throughout, Shibe’s guitar dynamic tended to dominate, at times wailing over everything else to fine aggressive effect. In certain moments, this composition came close to verging on contemporary music-writing but, for the most part, its progress – for 2007 – didn’t move into new ground.
Serving as a hiatus between Shibe’s two electric guitar exhibitions came Hirta Rounds by Irish-born David Fennessy. This modern take on the tone poem concentrates on a now-deserted island off the Scottish Atlantic coast. This was excellent illustrative music, the bleak atmosphere set early by a harmonics-laden solo from principal ACO cello Timo-Veikko Valve. This set up the prevailing action of a short motive or pattern moving quickly into a diminuendo: a clever depiction of emptiness and desolation. As participants had a degree of freedom within their groupings, the results came over as freshly textured, even if the loud-to-soft pattern began to pall, especially at the half-way pause-point where the score appeared to take up almost where it began.
Nevertheless, as a representation of emptiness in a landscape, of humanity leaving not a wrack behind, this work showed a surprising individuality if, like Miller’s concerto, it moved nowhere but was content to revolve around a series of repeated gestures; well, what did you expect of a work that specifies rounds in its title? Further, being one of only two works on the program specifically written for strings, Fennessy’s score distinguished itself with its fluctuating timbral display, specifically the filigree work for upper strings. Also, to be much applauded, it didn’t quite wear out its welcome.
With the three selections from Bothy Culture – Ud the Doudouk, Aye?, Shputnik In Glenshiel – we encountered another facet of Scottish modern musical practice where the old forms meet up with the contemporary-of-a-sort in rock, or rock inflections. To be honest, this type of fusion (the third Australian premiere on the program) leaves me cold and I found little of interest, apart from double bass Maxim Bibeau moving to a bass guitar for most of its duration, and cellist Julian Thompson, who appeared to be providing an extra player from the scheduled three in Hirta Rounds (although positioned between second violins and violas) also taking up a bouzouki (could that be right?) in the rear ranks alongside Bibeau.
To be fair, I don’t know the original Bennett album, but this exposure to Crabb’s arrangement didn’t inspire me to research it overmuch. Like several pieces earlier in the program, the main practice seemed to be to take a tune and then give it variants. I also suspect that the order was changed for the last two pieces and we heard the Shputnik In Glenshiel reel before the program concluded with Aye? that was notable for Shibe’s spoken monosyllables as well as his playing. Or perhaps by this stage I was hallucinating and the night’s many elements were merging into one long Caledonian mental miasma.
Despite the acclaim that greeted Bennett’s compilation on its release, I’m not convinced that it does more than confirm a generic sound through the three ‘grooves’ that served to differentiate these final pieces. For all that, you could admire Shibe’s assured performance, particularly in the clear-speaking pieces early in the night. And you have to credit Tognetti and his players for their handling of this material and their imperturbability when faced with its unadventurous, atmospherically repetitive nature.
O'Connell the Music 