Chanter with Sean Shibe
Jonny Greenwood (b.1971)
Water
Time was that Jonny Greenwood was best known as the guitarist of Radiohead. His BAFTA-winning score for the 2007 western There Will be Blood first alerted the world to his orchestral imagination, and in recent years he’s emerged as one of the most potent and distinctive voices in contemporary classical music and cinema, with award-winning film scores for Phantom Thread (2018) and The Power of the Dog (2021). In some senses, it’s a homecoming; he played the viola and organ at school in Oxfordshire and cites Olivier Messiaen and Krzysztof Penderecki as personal influences.
Water was a commission from the director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the violinist Richard Tognetti, in 2014. It was inspired says Greenwood, “by Philip Larkin’s poem of the same name, which alludes to a glass of water ‘where any-angled light would congregate endlessly’”. For Tognetti, “’a little night music’ is exactly what Jonny’s piece is. It’s something I would suggest you play once the sun sets, for its hypnotic drone-like structure presents something that really works best as daylight fades away.”
Oliver Leith (b.1990)
Honey Siren
- (Like thick air) – II. (Full like drips) – III. (Like slow dancing in honey)
“My approach is totally magpie-ish” said the British composer Oliver Leith in an interview with the Financial Times in 2024. “Anything goes. Anything that achieves the feeling that I’m after”. He cheerfully admits that “I’m happy to compose in any form. I don’t think doing orchestral music is better than doing a folk song or an advert. I would do a jingle if it was an interesting thing to do and if I had full rein and freedom.” That same eclectic spirit brought Leith widespread acclaim when his opera Last Days (inspired by the life of Kurt Cobain) opened in London in 2022. Born in Northern Ireland but trained in London, he’s emerged as one of the 21st century’s most striking musical imaginations.
Leith wrote Honey Siren in 2019 for 12 Ensemble. “I was thinking about sirens; the wailing kind, not the bird-women singing on rocks. They make these beautiful, huge oblong sweeping glissandi between high and low, like a machine crying. They usually signal something ominous; these sirens do not. They are honeyed, dripping in globules of sweetness, golden and moving between solid and fluid. Like a smiling alarm.”
Gavin Bryars (b.1943)
After the Requiem
The composer writes:
I had written the Cadman Requiem in 1989 for the Hilliard Ensemble in memory of my friend and sound engineer Bill Cadman, who was killed in the Lockerbie air crash. His death affected me very deeply and, pending a recording of this piece, Manfred Eicher asked if I might like to develop an instrumental work from this, using the same instrumentation for accompaniment. The piece is “after” the Requiem therefore in the musical sense of being based on it, in the chronological sense of following on from it, and in the spiritual sense of representing that state which remains after mourning is (technically) over.
I wrote the piece in Venice in September 1990 and finished it in Oslo on the day of the recording, where I added the electric guitar of Bill Frisell. This, I felt, blended particularly well with low strings (originally 2 violas and cello; in live performance sometimes viola, cello and bass). Coincidentally, having used certain distortion effects on the guitar, we found that we were recording on the twentieth anniversary of the death of Jimi Hendrix. Within the music I use one or two modified extracts from the Cadman Requiem itself, and from its common source Invention of Tradition, for which Bill Cadman had done the sound design.
Thomas Adès (b.1971)
Shanty – Over the Sea
Thomas Adès wrote Shanty in 2020 for a consortium of international chamber orchestras, headed by the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Britten Sinfonia. In his own words:
A shanty is a song in many verses sung by a group of sailors at work. The melody is sung many times, never the same, with a strong rhythmic pulse but not necessarily literal unanimity.
A shanty, along with any folk song in the English-language traditions, creates depth through repetition of the melody and variation of the story. In this Shanty fifteen individual voices, sometimes together and sometimes divergent, create a widening seascape.
In a shanty, the cyclical verses build a story of the harsh, mechanical routine of the petty captain’s rule, and accumulate a longing for mutiny. As in a slave spiritual, there is an implied yearning for liberation, freedom from the false, arbitrary regime of the petty masters, and a dream of a safe harbour beyond.
Shanty is written for the musicians of the orchestras who play it.
Cassandra Miller (b.1976)
Chanter
Premiered on 11 April 2024 at Milton Court, London by Sean Shibe and the Dunedin Consort conducted by John Butt. The composer writes:
One afternoon, guitarist Sean Shibe visited my apartment and sang along to the music of Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul. I recorded his singing, and layered his voice many times on itself – he then sang along to his own recorded voice again and again, reclining on the sofa, until he was somewhere between sleep and song: sleep-chanting.
The chanter is the part of the bagpipes on which one plays the melody. I’ve taken the sleep-recording of Sean, and I accurately transcribed his sighing to form the skeletal architecture for the guitar part of this concerto. I returned also to the recorded performance of Brìghde. the source melody is Brìghde’s live performance of O Chiadain an Lo, as recorded in Sligachan on the Isle of Skye. In her hands, the melody is breathtaking.
This concerto, Chanter, is quite far from her melody, having been transformed into something new – but without her work, nothing of this concerto would exist. The result of all this is a warbling, folk-like, sighing mantra, repeated by the guitar until we reach a dreamlike landscape – all the while carried by the string ensemble’s rippling, lulling, rocking – in four verses and coda, played continuously:
Verse 1: Rippling
Verse 2: Bellow-breathing
Verse 3: Sleep-chanting
Verse 4: Slowing Air
Coda: Honey-dreaming
Maria Włoszczowska
Polish violinist Maria Włoszczowska is recognised for her versatile musicianship, performing as a soloist, director and chamber musician, in addition to her roles as Artistic Partner of the Royal Northern Sinfonia and Director and Leader of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.
Recent career highlights include Maria’s solo debut at the BBC Proms with the Royal Northern Sinfonia and conductor Dinis Sousa, directing the Chamber Orchestra of Europe at Mozartwoche Salzburg and in Kronberg, directing the Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife, performing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Mozart’s Violin Concerto No.5 with Orquestra XXI, and concertos by Vivaldi, Bach and Telemann with Neues Bachisches Collegium Musicum under the baton of Reinhard Goebel at Leipzig’s Gewandhaus. In the 2024/25 season, Maria performed as soloist and director with, among others, the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and Amsterdam Sinfonietta, as well as returning to the Chamber Orchestra of Europe for several projects as their newly appointed Director and Leader.
Maria appears frequently at Wigmore Hall and at international festivals such as Musikdorf Ernen, Lockenhaus Festival, Lammermuir Festival and IMS Prussia Cove as well as in residency at Yellow Barn, Vermont. Distinguished artists such as Jeremy Denk, Alasdair Beatson and Dinis Sousa regularly join Maria in recital and recent highlights include her New York recital debut presenting all six Bach Sonatas for violin and keyboard and performing Ives’ complete cycle of Violin Sonatas at Wigmore Hall and Lammermuir Festival alongside Jeremy Denk.
A recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Emily Anderson Prize, Maria based herself in the UK after completing her studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Hungarian violinist and conductor András Keller. In 2018 she won both First Prize and Audience Prize at the XXI Leipzig International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition. Maria plays on a violin by Francesco Stradivari.
Sean Shibe
Sean Shibe continues to establish himself as a boundary-pushing force in contemporary classical music.
Highlights of Shibe’s 2025/26 season include the world premiere of Mark Simpson’s electric guitar concerto ZEBRA at the 2025 BBC Proms, his debut with London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Thomas Adès, a residency at the Southbank Centre including his debut with Philharmonia Orchestra under Marin Alsop, a residency at Porto’s Casa da Música, and recital tours across the UK, Europe and the US. This season he premieres works by Tyshawn Sorey, Poul Ruders, Carola Bauckholt and Ben Nobuto.
Recent engagements include a residency at Wigmore Hall, featuring a special programme marking Pierre Boulez’s centenary with the chamber cantata Le Marteau sans maître (a programme which also went to Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Aldeburgh Festival and the BBC Proms). Shibe also toured the UK with folk fiddler Aidan O’Rourke; collaborated across the UK and Europe with mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska in an innovative exploration of the Orlando myth incorporating electronics, melodica, protest songs and spoken word; and joined tenor Karim Sulayman for a critically acclaimed U.S. tour of their GRAMMY-nominated programme Broken Branches. He also made debuts in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and toured Australia with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, performing Cassandra Miller’s concerto Chanter in thirteen concerts nationwide.
Shibe works closely with a diverse range of musicians and ensembles. In recent years, he has collaborated with The Hallé, BBC Scottish Symphony and BBC Philharmonic Orchestras, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Northern Sinfonia, Britten Sinfonia, The King’s Singers, Manchester Collective, Dunedin Consort, Quatuor Van Kujik, Danish String Quartet, LUDWIG, and conductors Thomas Adès, Krzysztof Urbański, Anja Bihlmaier, Delyana Lazarova and Andrew Manze, flautist Adam Walker, violist Timothy Ridout, singers Allan Clayton, Ben Johnson, Robert Murray and Robin Tritschler, and performance artist Marina Abramović, among others.
Shibe is an ardent supporter of contemporary music, taking a hands-on approach to new commissions and working with composers to experiment with and expand the guitar repertoire. Premieres to date include works by Thomas Adès, Oliver Leith, Cassandra Miller, Sasha Scott, Daniel Kidane, David Fennessy, Shiva Feshareki, David Lang, Freya Waley-Cohen, James Dillon and Mark Simpson. He is equally committed to the canon, regularly pairing bold, new pieces with his own transcriptions of J.S. Bach’s lute suites and seventeenth-century Scottish lute manuscripts.
BISHI
BISHI is an artist, composer and producer born in London of Bengali heritage. As a multi-instrumentalist, she has been trained in both Hindustani and Western Classical styles and studied the sitar under Gaurav Mazumdar, a senior disciple of Ravi Shankar. BISHI has independently released three albums and several EPs on her own label Gryphon Records to critical acclaim. She co-produced her third album ‘Let My Country Awake,’ released in October 2021. Part-inspired by groundbreaking essay collection, ‘The Good Immigrant’ and Tagore’s Nobel-winning poem exploring borderless identity, ‘Let My Country Awake’ features revolutionary use of BISHI’s trademark electric sitar and four-octave vocal range alongside sampled interviews from Nikesh Shukla, Salena Godden, and Darren Chetty. The album’s themes focus on dual identities, anti-racism, and a call to find empathy in a divided world.
BISHI has recorded work with Tony Visconti, Sean Ono Lennon, Jarvis Cocker, and Daphne Guinness. Her collaborations and commissions for the stage include; The London Symphony Orchestra, The Kronos Quartet, Yoko Ono’s Meltdown, a film collaboration with fashion designer Manish Arora, and the City of London Sinfonia as a Tanpura soloist on Jonny Greenwood’s Water. BISHI’s compositions have been placed in both film (Tropique dir Eduoard Salier (2023) and TV (Disney+, Channel 4). She produced LANDR’s first-ever Sitar Sample pack and has recently worked with Real World Studios, Spitfire Audio, Spitalfields Music, Ableton and Delic. BISHI’s first sound art installation Reflektions sold out the Random String Festival at Coventry City of Culture 2021, has been exhibited internationally and in 2022 became the first artist’s work to be project-mapped across UNESCO World Heritage sites, The Queen’s House & Royal Naval College, London.
In 2023, BISHI composed and produced her first original score for VR experience Maya, The Birth of a Superhero, receiving Special Jury Mention at TriBeCa Film Festival. She has composed choral music for Trans Voices, the UK’s first professional trans+ choir and in 2023 become part of a team developing an AI composer tool with the University of Sheffield. In 2024, BISHI composed the original score for her first TV series, Defiance – Fighting the Far Right for Channel 4.
Royal Northern Sinfonia
Internationally renowned, calling Gateshead home.
37 musicians at the top of their game. Electrifying music, old and new. All the talent, determination, and creativity of the North East on a worldwide stage. From their home at The Glasshouse International Centre for Music, Royal Northern Sinfonia share the joy and wonder of orchestral music with thousands of people across the North of England – and beyond – every year.
From symphonies to string quartets, film soundtracks to choral masses, and original performances with awesome artists from Sheku Kanneh-Mason to Self Esteem, the orchestra’s members have got one of the most varied jobs there is. They’re always looking for fresh new sounds from up-and-coming composers, inviting local communities to share a stage, and doing everything they can to inspire and prepare the musicians of tomorrow to one day take their place.
They’re also working hard to smash the barriers that can stop brilliant people getting into classical music. They’ve teamed up with national partners to support women conductors to develop their careers, to help global majority musicians get vital experience in the orchestra world, and to celebrate disabled and non-disabled musicians breaking new ground together in inclusive ensemble RNS Moves. And they bring new musical opportunities to the region, headlining the first-ever BBC Proms weekend outside London.
Because they whole-heartedly believe orchestral music is for anyone – big cities and rural villages, tiny babies and life-long listeners, die-hard fans and curious minds – they travel far and wide to make sure there’s top-notch classical music on offer for anyone ready to say “I’ll give that a go”. You’ll find them in churches, castles, and community venues across the North, as well as leading the charge in Carlisle, Kendal, Middlesbrough, and Sunderland.
With 65 years of success to build on, they’ve signed a dynamic artistic leadership – Music Director Dinis Sousa, Artistic Partner Maria Włoszczowska, Principal Guest Conductor Nil Venditti and Associate Conductor Ellie Slorach – to lead the way into a bold, bright future.
Wherever the orchestra play and whoever they share a stage with, every performance is a chance to see, hear and feel the music.
