Review by Karim Sulayman/Sean Shibe – the guitarist and guitarist hypnotize with sound and charm | Classical music

The tenor Karim Sulayman and the guitar Sean Shibe together bringing a microcosm of international heritage to the concert platform: English, Japanese, Scottish, Lebanese and American. Their Broken Branches reading program also offers many ideas, remembered and imagined. Its title comes from Sinan Antoon’s poem of being an Iraqi refugee in New York, which was launched in 2022 by Layale Chaker – the song that came at the end of the series that started with Li Beirut, the loud cry of the capital of Lebanon. But if that’s indicative of a program that’s going through a rough patch, the play leans toward joy.

The program has been well managed – they released a recorder in 2023 – but the details here are still very vague. A small but fascinating conversation between cultures in the music played by the tenor and the guitar sitting side by side, on equal footing, and Sulayman was the singer. Purcell’s music For a while was the setter, joined in pieces by his traveling companion Dowland. In a trio of oriental-looking Italian Renaissance madrigals, the melancholy Monteverdi finds Sulayman holding high notes that would not be heard in Italian opera three centuries later; The same singer La Mia Turca made him sound at the end of each verse in a way that made the rejected singer a joke. A quiet Sephardic love song gave way to an Arab-Andalusi guitar riff that leads into El Helwa Di, a lively Egyptian number with Sulayman rocking a falsetto. Only in Britten’s Songs from the Chinese, setting the old words translated by a Western poet of the 1920s, did the music feel confident – perhaps unsurprisingly given Britten’s outsider views.

Among Shibe’s most impressive solos was Jonathan Harvey’s Sufi Dance from 1997 – a haunting, half-remembered, high-pitched guitar chord remade to recapture the sound of an obscure instrument. As for Sulayman, he was a storyteller in several languages ​​- English, Italian, Arabic and finally Spanish, he has a Mexican problem. Together, he and Shibe managed to stay silent for a long time, their audience enthralled.