Review by Karim Soliman/Shaun Shippy – Tenor and guitarist bluff in a wide-ranging, joyful recital | classical music

TTogether, tenor Karim Soliman and guitarist Sean Shippy bring a microcosm of world heritage to the concert stage: English, Japanese, Scottish, Lebanese and American. Their EP “Broken Branches” similarly offers a multitude of perspectives, both remembered and imagined. Its title is inspired by a poem written by Sinan Antun about being an Iraqi refugee in New York, composed by Layali Shaker in 2022 – a song that came at the end of a series that begins with “Le Beirut,” a powerful elegy for the Lebanese capital. However, if this indicated a heavy programme, this performance was ultimately leaning towards joy.

The show is well-run – they released a recording in 2023 – but much here still feels spontaneous. The small, evocative cross-cultural dialogues in the songs played the part of the tenor and the guitarist sitting side by side, at an equal level, and Solomon was the vocalist. Purcell’s music was for a time setting the scene, incorporated into pieces by his well-traveled compatriot Dowland. In a trilogy of oriental Italian Renaissance songs, Monteverdi’s melancholy finds Solomon carrying high notes that would not have seemed out of place in Italian opera three centuries later. The composer’s own La Mia Turca had him deploring the melodic lines at the end of each verse in a way that made the rejected suitor the butt of the joke. A quietly intense Sephardic love song gives way to an Arabic-Andalusian guitar piece that in turn leads into “The Sweetheart,” an upbeat Egyptian number with Soliman singing falsetto. Only in Britten’s Songs from the Chinese, which includes ancient lyrics translated by a Western poet from the 1920s, does the music feel self-conscious—perhaps not surprising given Britten’s penchant for an outsider’s point of view.

Of Sheppie’s solos, Jonathan Harvey’s 1997 Mystic Dance was the most striking – a beguiling, half-remembered impression, the top string of the guitar resetting the pitch to restore the sound of an unfamiliar instrument. As for Suleiman, he was a narrator in several languages: English, Italian, Arabic, and finally Spanish, with a sad Mexican look. Together, he and Sheppey were able to maintain long periods of silence, enslaving their audience.