This collaboration between Manchester Collective and guitarist Sean Shibe promised to be electrifying and so it was: boundary-pushing and genre-defying being fundamental to both their approaches, all achieved with unassuming flair. In this first outing of their eight-concert tour, the transatlantic programming was an invitation to the audience to be as curious about the nature and power of sound as they themselves clearly are. By way of acclimatisation, the Collective’s artistic director violinist Rakhi Singh and Shibe on electric guitar began with two of John Cage’s Six Melodies, the almost folk-like simplicity of the instruments’ responses to each other played out in an infinite variety of ways, with the remaining two pairs of melodies interlaced into the overall sequence as though offering periodic Zen zoning-out.
David Fennessy’s Rosewood was named for the aromatic wood used to fashion guitar fingerboards, but has also given its title to this tour and its meditative theme. Originally a solo piece performed by Shibe’s teacher Allan Neave, Fennessy rejigged it for Shibe as the plural Rosewoods with string quartet all close-mic’d – as is the collective’s practice – but blending carefully with the acoustic guitar. The sequence of five reflections on light and, within it, moments of poised silence had a captivating quality, particularly its central movement with gentle guitar figurations. At the end came a radiant calm.
Two pieces specially commissioned from Kelly Moran and Emily Hall for quartet and electric guitar were premiered here: each memorialising dead friends, not in sadness but rather in calmly life-affirming vein. Moran’s Living Again spun out melody, with the last of the three movements giving the guitar a free and improvisatory feel. In Potential Space, Hall’s concern with texture was implicit: the guitar being played with a bow against the quartet’s pizzicato at the opening in itself confounded expectations, the instruments’ interplay going on to hinge on resonances expressively suspended in air or fading into nothing.
David Lang’s Killer had already killed any notion of dedicated airy-fairyness, as did the ensemble’s contemporary variations on La Folia, wild and passionate. But Shibe’s own arrangement of Julius Eastman’s Buddha – an extraordinary score notated within the shape of an egg – was the final reinforcement of this musician’s creative imagination, his alternating of electric and acoustic instruments with the strings brilliantly engineered. Unfazed by an initial technology blip, it was delivered with a mix of respect and collective panache.
