Composer: Benjamin Britten, Giulio Caccini, Layale Chaker, Sayed Darwish, John Dowland, Jonathan Dean Harvey, Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi, Toru Takemitsu
Performer: Karim Sulayman, Sean Shibe
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Pentatone
Catalogue: PTC5187031
Release: 2023
Size: 1.74 GB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
01. Dowland: Time stands still
02. Harvey: Sufi Dance
03. Caccini: Dalla porta d’oriente
04. Monteverdi: Si dolce e’l tormento, SV332
05. Monteverdi: La mia turca
06. Traditional Sephardic: La prima vez (Arranged Karim Sulayman and Sean Shibe)
07. Traditional Arab-Andalusian: Lamma bada yatathanna (Arranged by Sean Shibe)
08. Darwish: El helwa di (Arranged by Karim Sulayman and Sean Shibe)
09. Fairuz: Li Beirut (Arranged by Karim Sulayman and Sean Shibe)
10. Chaker: A Butterfly in New York
Takemitsu: In the Woods – Three pieces for guitar
11. I. Wainscot Pond
Britten: Songs from the Chinese, Op. 58
12. No. 1 The Big Chariot
13. No. 2 The Old Lute
14. No. 3 The Autumn Wind
15. No. 4 The Herd-boy
16. No. 5 Depression
17. No. 6 Dance Song
Tenor Karim Sulayman and guitarist Sean Shibe present Broken Branches, a conceptual album with music ranging from Dowland, Monteverdi, Britten, Rodrigo, Takemitsu, Harvey, and Chaker to traditional songs from the Middle East, scrutinizing the close cultural and musical ties between East and West. This musical exploration ties in with the artists’ personal experience of a dynamic, in-between identity, as they grew up in the West having ethnic roots in the East (Lebanon and Japan respectively). Broken Branches explores the wood of the guitar and its relatives, as well as the splintering of history known as diaspora. Karim Sulayman has garnered international attention as a sophisticated and versatile artist, and won a Grammy Award for Classical Solo Vocal in 2019. Multi-award-winning guitarist Sean Shibe brings a fresh and innovative approach to the traditional classical guitar, while also exploring contemporary music and repertoire for electric guitar. He continues his exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE after his well received Camino(2021) and Lost & Found (2022).
Programs mixing Eastern and Western materials are common enough, and even those showing the deep interwovenness of East and West, such as those of Jordi Savall, have become more common. Still, it is hard to top this release by tenor Karim Sulayman and guitarist Sean Shibe for sheer ambition. The booklet notes by Olivia Giovetti amplify the idea in a dozen different ways, with extensive reference to Edward Said and to the Arabic ancestry of the guitar, but the basic premise is that “shoehorning things into a forced binary of ‘East’ and ‘West’ eliminates a spectrum of identities more slippery than settled.” Nearly everything here cuts both ways, from a Dowland song accompanied by guitar in the role of the lute (oud), to Sephardic and Arab-Andalusian songs, to a popular song by vocalist Fairuz that draws on Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. One key idea is that musical borrowings are always filtered through the borrower in a kind of imperfect recollection, something explicitly affirmed by Benjamin Britten in connection with his Songs from the Chinese. Many of these strands converge in the Sufi Dance of Jonathan Harvey, a work that the album offers as underrated; listeners will be ready to agree. One might not necessarily choose these players as interpreters of the individual works here, but the album, as a whole, is compelling and thought-provoking.