In November Sean Shibe gives the Australian premiere of Cassandra Miller’s Chanter, her concerto for guitar and strings, as part of a tour with Australian Chamber Orchestra directed by Richard Tognetti. It appears as part of the programme Scotland Unbound in Wollongong, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth – full details here. The tour will be the celebrated guitarist's Australian debut.
Chanter is cast in four verses and a coda, played continuously: ‘Rippling’, ‘Bellow-breathing’, ‘Sleep-chanting’, ‘Slowing Air’ and a Coda, ‘Honey-dreaming’. The work is inspired by Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul, whose live performance of O Chiadain an Lo, recorded in Sligachan on the Isle of Skye, provided a key musical prompt for much of the work’s material and atmosphere. Though the original melody is from 1784, Chaimbeul arranged it for the small-pipes and transposed it into the Dorian mode.
Creating Chanter saw Shibe join in Miller’s process of ‘automatic singing’. One afternoon in her apartment Shibe sang along to Chaimbeul’s track; he then sang along to his own recorded voice over and over, reclining on the sofa, until he was somewhere between sleep and waking: “sleep-chanting”, in Miller’s words. From this Miller created a warbling, folk-like, sighing mantra, repeated by the guitar until it reaches a dreamlike landscape – all the while carried by the string ensemble’s rippling, lulling, and rocking. Miller discusses creating the work in The Guardian here.
The title of the piece refers to the part of the bagpipes on which the melody is played, often with many evocative and heartbreaking ornaments, with Miller especially captivated by the finger vibrato: “waving the finger in the air to make a ‘timbral trill’”, Miller says, “drawing attention (as moth-wings to light) to that moment (or flight-path) of the melodic line”. Sometimes Chaimbeul’s original melody peaks through in the string ensemble, “as occasional shafts of richly-coloured light.”
As part of the tour on 15 November Shibe also presents the Australian premiere of Thomas Adès’ Forgotten Dances, in a one-off recital at Pier 2/3, The Neilson, in Sydney. The 20-minute piece is cast in six movements and is the composer’s first ever published solo work for an instrument other than keyboard. It was premiered by Shibe at the Vienna Konzerthaus in October 2023; its various episodes recall figures as diverse as Max Ernst, Hector Berlioz, Henry Purcell, and Luis Buñuel.