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LETTER of the MONTH
Plucky spirits
It’s fortuitous that Sean Shibe (cover, October) decided to be a guitarist. Undoubtedly, he’s changing the trajectory of the instrument and its repertoire, one that really had come to a dead end. Yes, since Julian Bream there have been many fine players, many of whom have eclipsed Bream’s virtuosic but essentially self-taught, rather torturous technique, but none of whom would have had the chutzpah as Bream did to go up to Stravinsky during an orchestral rehearsal and offer to play Dowland on the lute in the hope that he could be persuaded to write something for the guitar. OK, Bream was unsuccessful on that occasion, but he got round Britten, Walton, Berkeley et al and so gifted the guitar a present and future that was not shackled to what Bream coined ‘occasional music’, essentially the picture-postcard, Spanish stuff. Shibe, like Bream, is taken seriously by non-guitarist composers and, like Bream, has the need to be collaborative. He is his own person with an intellect, technique, musicality and vision that is rare; and an instinct and self-belief to rattle cages and take the instrument to places others cannot reach, even if they knew such places existed. And I have never heard Bach so beautifully played on the guitar – not even by Bream.
Ruth Nunn, Bath
Recorder master
Your Forgotten Voices feature (November issue) was fascinating. Two German emigré composers, Franz Reizenstein and Hans Gál: both had distinguished composing careers in Britain, though since their deaths their music is not performed or broadcast as often as it deserves, despite the stalwart encouragement of both their families in the UK. The story of Robert Müller-Hartmann is a sad one, and I doubt if his name is known now to many musicians, despite the Vaughan Williams connection. But it most certainly was to me as a young recorder player, and to numerous others of my generation, since his delightful Suite for three recorders, published by Schott in the days when they were the publishers of recorder music, was one of my favourite recorder consort pieces, along with works by Peter Fricker, Imogen Holst, Edmund Rubbra, Tippett, Hindemith and, of course, Britten himself (the picturesque Alpine Suite). I still have my well fingered copy of the Müller-Hartmann Suite, and it stands up very well in such distinguished
