EIF music reviews: Sean Shibe | JLCO with Yuja Wang

Sean Shibe, Queen’s Hall ★★★★★

With an artist like Sean Shibe, we know that the future of instrumental music is in wonderfully unsafe hands. His beautifully crafted programme for EIF gave us portraits of love, affection and frustration.

There were challenges and comfort in Dowland pieces of pristine elegance and limpid gloom, warm but also furious visions of Spain, and a brilliant 2025 solo work from Thomas Adès. Shibe has the finest artists’ skill of creating absolute intimacy where no space exists between the platform and audience. His playing becomes the air we breathe, the landscape in which we loiter.

The early pieces – by little known 16th century musician Alonso Mudarra, who later became a priest, and the less overtly godly John Dowland – unfurled with a restraint and simplicity which underlined that for a composer, from whatever century, soul and human spirit are mystical, internal things; their art serves to articulates that mystery. Simplicity, where the performer has the music reach us with such absolute purity, is a privilege.

Francisco Coll’s recent Safarad introduced a fierce, introverted world of barely contained rage alternating with dream-like serenity. Mother-in-law, named for the person the composer allegedly wanted to kill, emerged in mincing, insect sounds interrupted by savage chords. The Daughter portrait swerved between a declaration of devoted love and the kind of repressed fury reserved for filthy student bedrooms and dented parental bank cards.

In Adès stunning Forgotten Dances, as Shibe explained, the composer pushes his performer’s skill just as he has stretched his own world of sounds and textures. The six pieces explore how memory and distance seep into our daily excursions. The music drips liquid phrases, recalls clonking bells and tiny fanfares, and finishes in a profound but gentle prayer to Purcell.

Intellect, talent, intuition... Shibe upturned EIF’s slogan is “Don’t think. Feel.” He showed us how to do both. Mary Miller

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JLCO with Yuja Wang, Usher Hall ★★★

As the clock strayed beyond 6pm, the expectancy circulating a packed Usher Hall grew increasingly palpable. Were the audience more anxious to see pianist Yuja Wang, swapping her charismatic classical persona for a dizzy night of jazz, or the cool, liquid seasoning that is Wynton Marsalis’ Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra? Going by the eventual reception, Wang just edged it, responding to deafening cheers with a jabbing bow straight out of the Glasgow Kiss handbook. Good job nobody was on the receiving end.

Marsalis’s “world premiere” programme, bringing to a close his orchestra’s EIF residency, drew together juicy new arrangements by his band members, intimately textured, modestly dazzling, playing to the strengths of a grizzly saxophone line-up, punchy brass, subtly agile drum and bass, with the odd Sixties’ solo vibe of flute/piccolo thrown in. But the common thread – celebrating “the explosion of piano virtuosity in 20th century jazz” – threw the spotlight inevitably on Wang.

If Dave Brubeck’s tangy Blue Rondo à la Turk laboured to establish its side-stepping rhythmic groove, the carnival heat of Ernesto Lecuona’s La Comparsa (from Danza Afro-Cubanas) – and later the fiery gypsy abandon of his Gitanerias – bore magic in bassist Carlos Henrique’s exotic arrangements.

Wang softened the tone with pianist Joe Block’s lush arrangement of Ellington’s Reflections in D, before channelling her inner Oscar Peterson in the restless moto perpetuo of his aptly-named L’Impossible. A sign she was beginning to catch the mood.

Yet when it came to Leroy Carr’s How Long Blues, arranged (and touchingly sung) by trombonist Sherman Irby, Wang’s delivery seemed frustratingly four-square. The moody soundscape of Marsalis’ Marthaniel reversed the tide towards an uplifting closing coupling of Art Tatum’s breathtaking Tiger Rag and Joseph Kosma’s smoochy Autumn Leaves. In this scenario, Wang deservedly commanded admiration, but didn’t always capture the heart. Ken Walton 

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