The Guardian has awarded four stars to Sean Shibe’s Vesper, with critic Clive Paget describing the album as a series of mind-expanding flights of fancy.
The review praises Thomas Adès’s Forgotten Dances for imbuing traditional baroque dance forms with an additional imaginative layer, highlighting the Overture, Queen of the Spiders for its combination of stately harmonics and sneaking slides, and calling Shibe’s playing throughout acutely articulate and technically impeccable. Paget also singles out Harrison Birtwistle’s five melodic miniatures as a likely revelation for listeners, describing Berceuse de Jeanne and Sleep Song as bewitching lullabies, while calling Beyond the White Hand the thorniest music on the album, a tough nut to crack that Shibe nonetheless masters.
James Dillon’s 12 Caprices close the album, described as a series of concise meditations that bring the recital to a somewhat elusive conclusion.
Vesper is out now on PENTATONE.
