Karim Sulayman, Sean Shibe – Broken Branches (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 51:14 minutes | 1,76 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © PentaTone

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.
– James Manheim
(more…)