Broken Branches Britten: Songs from the Chinese; plus songs by Caccini, Chaker, Darwish, Dowland, J Harvey, Monteverdi, Takemitsu et al Karim Sulayman (tenor), Sean Shibe (guitar) Pentatone PTC 5187 031 51:16 mins
This reflective album from tenor Karim Sulayman and guitarist Sean Shibe explores ideas of home, statehood and identity as expressed (or indeed complicated) by music. Both performers have roots in more than one cultural tradition – Sulayman is a first-generation Lebanese-American, while Edinburgh-raised Shibe was born to an English father and Japanese mother – and the album is at once a journey and a conversation, traversing time and geography through repertoire to unpick how music can both stabilise and unsettle us.
The programme ranges from Monteverdi’s borrowed ‘Eastern’ modalities in ‘La mia turca’ to a new arrangement of the traditional Sephardic song ‘La Prima Vez’. Subverting the customary flow of musical ‘borrowing’, the album also includes an appealing rendition of Lebanese singer Fairuz’s 1984 ballad ‘Li Beirut’, a song which takes as its melody the iconic slow-movement theme from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. The album’s prevailing mood of meditation and lamentation is expressed most profoundly in the new commission ‘A Butterfly in New York’ by Layale Chaker which draws on both Western and Arabic soundworlds to trace the splintering of a family tree into the global diaspora.
Shibe brings a lively charisma and a vibrant array of musical colour to the album, conjuring everything from 17th-century lute to Arabic oud across this wide-reaching programme. Sulayman’s performance at times feels too restrained, but his interpretation of Britten’s Songs from the Chinese has a wonderful piquancy and dynamism, and brings this thoughtful release to a rewarding close.
Kate Wakeling
