Villa-Lobos, Agustín Barrios Mangoré, Ginastera and others: Profesión

Sean Shibe’s career to date has been marked less by settling into one repertoire lane than by moving deliberately between them, a Scottish/British traditional and contemporary programme on one disc, Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint played on electric guitar on another. Profesión, released on Pentatone in 2023, is a comparably pointed move into Latin American guitar repertoire, and it won the Instrumental Award at the 2024 BBC Music Magazine Awards.

About the programme

The disc centres on three major figures in 20th-century Latin American guitar writing: Heitor Villa-Lobos, the Brazilian composer whose Preludes and Études sit at the core of the modern classical guitar repertoire; Agustín Barrios Mangoré, the Paraguayan guitarist-composer whose La Catedral and Julia Florida are among the most frequently performed solo guitar pieces from the region; and Alberto Ginastera, the Argentine composer whose Guitar Sonata, Op. 47, is a considerably more harmonically and rhythmically demanding late-20th-century work than the Villa-Lobos and Barrios pieces surrounding it. Programming these three composers together traces a rough arc from the guitar’s more folk-and-song-rooted Latin American writing through to a modernist, virtuosic endpoint in the Ginastera.

About the performer

Sean Shibe was born in Edinburgh in 1992 and studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where he was the youngest student ever admitted to what was then the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. He was the first guitarist admitted to BBC Radio 3’s New Generation Artists scheme and the only solo guitarist to receive a Borletti-Buitoni Trust fellowship, and in 2018 became the first guitarist to win the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist award. His recorded output has ranged deliberately across very different territory, Scottish traditional and newly commissioned guitar music, Reich played on electric guitar, which makes a dedicated Latin American recital a further, distinct move rather than a continuation of any single specialism.

Ginastera’s Sonata, Op. 47, the disc’s technical centrepiece, was written in 1976 for the guitarist Carlos Barbosa-Lima and is in four movements, each headed with a marking referencing a different aspect of Argentine folk and guitar tradition, including a scordatura-influenced opening movement built on the open strings of a traditionally tuned guitar, and a fast, percussive finale. It sits at a considerably harder harmonic edge than the Villa-Lobos and Barrios pieces around it, closer to the mid-century modernist language of Ginastera’s orchestral and piano works than to the more song-like, folk-rooted guitar writing that dominates the rest of the disc, which is part of why the sonata is often treated as the technical and expressive high point of any recital that includes it.

Pentatone, the Dutch label behind this release, has built a reputation specifically around high-resolution recorded sound, it records in DSD (Direct Stream Digital) and issues discs as hybrid SACDs alongside standard formats, aimed at listeners who care about audio fidelity as much as repertoire. That audiophile-oriented engineering suits a solo guitar recital particularly well: an unamplified acoustic guitar has a wide dynamic range and a great deal of fine detail in its attack and decay that a lower-resolution recording can flatten out.

Barrios Mangoré, the least widely known of the three composers to general classical audiences, was himself a touring virtuoso guitarist as much as a composer, performing across Latin America and Europe in the early 20th century at a time when the classical guitar had little concert-hall standing compared with the piano or violin, much of his own music, including the pieces recorded here, was written as a vehicle for his own playing rather than intended as concert repertoire for other performers to take up. His rediscovery and rehabilitation into the standard guitar repertoire happened gradually over the following decades, largely through other guitarists’ advocacy, which is part of why La Catedral and Julia Florida now sit comfortably alongside Villa-Lobos in almost any serious guitar recital despite Barrios’s own considerably lower historical profile.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh for mmmusic, covering a real, current recording rather than a page recovered from the site’s 1991–2018 archive, the shop closed before this disc was released. The facts here have been independently verified rather than assumed or carried over from elsewhere.