The Guardian Classical Album of the Week
NPR All Things Considered Editors’ Pick
NPR Music’s 50 Best Albums of 2022
NPR Music’s Best Classical Albums of 2022
‘Prix Caecelia’ 2022, Belgian Musical Press
Sean Shibe’s second PENTATONE album Lost & Found is an ecstatic journey containing music by outsiders, mystics, visionaries, who often have more than one identity and lay claim to various artistic traditions, genres, or audiences. The repertoire ranges from Hildegard von Bingen to Olivier Messiaen, Moondog, Julius Eastman, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Meredith Monk, Shiva Feshareki, Oliver Leith and Daniel Kidane. Stretching ten centuries, these pieces are bound together by Shibe’s unique electric guitar sound and aesthetic.
The first print run of this album comes with an exclusive polaroid picture of Sean at the recording sessions.
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 label debut Camino (2021).
Order CD (official EU store): https://www.pentatonemusic.com/product/lost-found/
Order CD (Presto Classical, UK): https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/9337576–lost-found#about
Streaming: https://lnk.to/lostfoundshibe
Here’s another bonkers-at-first-glance, brilliantly curated album from the guitarist Sean Shibe. He describes Lost and Found as “an emporium of curiosities”, and all the exhibits are for electric guitar. That doesn’t mean all the music is modern. Two tracks are Shibe’s interpretation of melodies by Hildegard of Bingen, 900-odd years old. O Viridissima Virga sounds as if it’s being played on a church organ, the notes stark and loud, swathed in fluctuating overtones. By contrast, much later in the playlist – and you mess with the track order at your peril – O Choruscans Lux Stellarum keeps its melody swirling in the ether.
Finally, there’s Julius Eastman’s monumental Buddha, swooping like a slow siren, ending on a major chord that feels defiant. You won’t know what’s hit you.
The Guardian
The young Scottish classical guitarist Sean Shibe defies expectations. He thinks of his new album as an “overflowing toy box” of compositions, but actually it unfolds like a clever mixtape.
Throughout the album, the guitar substitutes for other instruments by way of Shibe’s crafty, and reliably tasteful, arrangements. Yet there is one piece meant to be played on electric guitar — Continuance, music written for Shibe by the rising young British composer Daniel Kidane. Meditative chords that float like clouds are pierced with beams of multi-colored light. The ethereal sounds emanate from the other electric guitar Shibe deploys on the album, a 35th anniversary edition of a PRS Custom 24-08.
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.
NPR, All Things Considered, Tom Huizenga
Despite the surface eclecticism, Shibe’s unique approach to the electric guitar – one based as much on exploring atemporal textures as on finding the vox humana, rather than the diabolus, in musica – binds together these pieces.
The opening track, Hildegard’s O viridissima virga – drone and chant electric’d – conjures images of a voice motivated by an unseen power. And a neon halo. There are also the ostinatos present in most of the works, dancing in the first of Chick Corea’s Children’s Songs, redolent of a mellow passacaglia in Moondog’s Pastoral II – such a contrast to the Beethovenian violence of the same composer’s preceding Sea Horse!
The trio of younger composers – Daniel Kidane, Oliver Leith and Shiva Feshareki – seem to inspire in Shibe an opaquer intensity. It is the arrangement of Messiaen’s O sacrum convivium! that under Shibe’s fingers truly evokes ‘eternity’s sunrise’, so strange, so magical is his/its vision.
Gramophone 10.22
Sean Shibe 