Broken Branches | Pentatone PTC5187031

Broken Branches

£14.49

In stock - available for despatch within 1 working day

Label: Pentatone

Cat No: PTC5187031

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Vocal/Choral

Release Date: 5th May 2023

Contents

About

Tenor Karim Sulayman and guitarist Sean Shibe present Broken Branches, a conceptual album with music ranging from Dowland, Monteverdi, Britten, Rodrigo, Takemitsu, Harvey, and Chaker to traditional songs from the Middle East, scrutinising the close cultural and musical ties between East and West. This musical exploration ties in with the artists’ personal experience of a dynamic, in-between identity, as they grew up in the West having ethnic roots in the East (Lebanon and Japan respectively). Broken Branches explores the wood of the guitar and its relatives, as well as the splintering of history known as diaspora.

Karim Sulayman has garnered international attention as a sophisticated and versatile artist, and won a Grammy Award for Classical Solo Vocal in 2019. Multi-award-winning guitarist Sean Shibe brings a fresh and innovative approach to the traditional classical guitar, while also exploring contemporary music and repertoire for electric guitar. He continues his exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE after his well received Camino (2021) and Lost & Found (2022).

Reviews

Broken Branches (Pentatone), by the guitarist Sean Shibe and tenor Karim Sulayman, is an eclectic album, built on friendship, which explores the performers’ own sense of identity, memory, diaspora, often in their own arrangements. ... Sulayman, a Lebanese-American singer, light-voiced and flexible, brings intensity to traditional Sephardic song, and new inflections to John Dowland, Claudio Monteverdi and Benjamin Britten (his six songs from the Chinese). El Helwa Di, by the Egyptian composer-singer Sayed Darwish (1892-1923), ripples with ornament and atmosphere.  Fiona Maddocks
The Observer 30 April 2023

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