Karim Sulayman/Sean Shibe review – tenor and guitarist beguile in wide-ranging and joyful recital

Wigmore Hall, London
From a lament to the Lebanese capital to Sephardic love songs, melancholy Monteverdi to Purcell and Britten, the pair’s ‘Broken Branches’ programme felt spontaneous and engaging

The tenor Karim Sulayman and guitarist Sean Shibe together bring a microcosm of world heritage to the concert platform: English, Japanese, Scottish, Lebanese and American. Their recital programme Broken Branches offers similarly a multitude of perspectives, both remembered and imagined. Its title comes from a poem by Sinan Antoon on being an Iraqi refugee in New York, set to music in 2022 by Layale Chaker – a song that came at the end of a sequence beginning with Li Beirut, a powerful lament for the Lebanese capital. Yet if that suggests a programme that’s heavy going, this performance ultimately leaned towards joy.

The programme is well run-in – they released a recording in 2023 – but much here still felt spontaneous. The small but evocative dialogues between cultures in the songs played out with tenor and guitarist seated alongside each other, on an equal level, and Sulayman was the balladeer. Purcell’s Music for a While was the scene-setter, merging into pieces by his well-travelled compatriot Dowland. In a trio of eastward-looking Italian Renaissance madrigals, melancholy Monteverdi found Sulayman holding high notes that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in Italian opera of three centuries later; the same composer’s La Mia Turca had him boo-hooing down the melodic lines at the end of each verse in a way that made the rejected suitor aptly the butt of the joke. A quietly intense Sephardic love song gave way to an Arab-Andalusian guitar piece leading in turn into El Helwa Di, a gleeful Egyptian number with Sulayman whooping into falsetto. Only in Britten’s Songs from the Chinese, setting ancient words translated by a 1920s western poet, did the music feel self-conscious – perhaps unsurprisingly given that Britten’s propensity for the outsider’s view.
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