Sean Shibe: Vesper review – ever imaginative guitar virtuouso brings mind-expanding flights of fancy | Music

On his new album, Sean Shibe surveys the guitar’s expressive potential through the lens of three British composers. There are interlocking themes here – Spain, 20th-century painters, antique musical forms – but this thoughtfully curated programme can be equally enjoyed piece by piece as a series of mind-expanding flights of fancy.

Thomas Adès’s Forgotten Dances pays homage to the baroque dance suite, the composer’s quirky titles imbuing traditional forms with an additional imaginative layer. Overture, Queen of the Spiders, for example, combines stately harmonics with sneaking slides and the occasional pounce (“fatal for the fly!” in the composer’s words). Barcarolle – The Maiden Voyage is a nostalgic lapping gymnopedie; Carillon de Ville a pealing tribute to the guitar-playing Hector Berlioz. In Vesper (for Henry Purcell), Adès reimagines the consolation of the older composer’s Evening Hymn. Shibe’s playing throughout is acutely articulate and technically impeccable.

The revelation for some will be five melodic miniatures by Harrison Birtwistle, three of them piano originals arranged for guitar by Forbes Henderson. Berceuse de Jeanne and Sleep Song, the latter written for his 10-year-old son, are bewitching lullabies. The gently introspective Oockooing Bird, written when the composer was just 16, is Birtwistle’s earliest acknowledged score. At more than 18 minutes, Beyond the White Hand is the thorniest music here. Shibe masters its fragmentary architecture, though it remains a tough nut to crack.

James Dillon’s 12 Caprices, a series of concise meditations exploring the relationship between the structure of the instrument and its modes of expression, brings this imaginative recital to a somewhat elusive conclusion.