SCO & Sean Shibe, East Neuk Festival review: 'tenderness and intimacy'

SCO & Sean Shibe, Bowhouse, St Monans ★★★★

With oystercatchers whirling above the heads of concertgoers as they arrived, and housemartins flitting back and forth to nests in the evening’s venue, nature felt gloriously close at the East Neuk Festival’s opening concert in St Monans’ cavernous Bowhouse.

There was a bracingly outdoor, authentic feel to the music inside too – kicked off in semi-ceremonial style with fiddler Donald Grant delivering a gradually coalescing tune while processing through the large and enthusiastic audience.

Andrew Manze | Chris Christodoulou

Grant’s tune felt like the natural upbeat to the sometimes rustic sounds of Larsson’s Pastoral Suite, which opened the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and conductor Andrew Manze’s buoyant programme – Manze virtually caressed the music into being, though the skittering melodies were punchy and the central Romance’s strings offered a wonderfully gilded, velvety sound, all the more pronounced in the Bowhouse’s rich acoustics.

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If there was tenderness and intimacy in Manze’s opener, there was even more in guitarist Sean Shibe’s remarkably crisp, nuanced account of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. Not that Shibe didn’t deliver on the piece’s flamboyant fingerwork and fiery rhythms, but he teased apart intertwined lines and shaped phrases with microscopic detail, all the while ensuring the music felt fresh and spontaneous – and, most importantly, played deeply from the heart.

Sean Shibe | Iga Gozdowska

SCO cor anglais player Katherine Brymer made for a particularly sonorous, soulful partner in the concert’s heartrending slow movement, matching Shibe’s sense of freedom and warmth.

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Manze drove the orchestra hard in the 21-year-old Schubert’s Sixth Symphony that closed the concert, foregrounding its strutting muscularity and wit, while also playing up the young composer’s evident cap-doffing to Beethoven, Haydn, Rossini and others. It was a convincingly gutsy account, delivering both drama and froth, that made a strong case for the Symphony, but it still felt like a bit of an unremarkable work for such an occasion – sunny, airy and spirited, certainly, but also surprisingly low-key.

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