Glasgow Cathedral Festival

Sean Shibe/Phantom of the Opera

Glasgow Cathedral

Keith Bruce

five stars

SATURDAY night’s double bill of entertainment in Glasgow Cathedral Festival’s diverse weekend of music might have been designed to show how much impact small forces can make in straitened times.

Guitarist Sean Shibe first unveiled the soft/LOUD show that would be his award-winning second album at Fife’s East Neuk Festival, but the huge sound of its multi-tracked climax was obviously more impressive in the vaulted acoustic of the cathedral than a community hall in Anstruther.

Under the title “Disjunctions”, this was an edited reprise of Shibe’s first huge success, with the addition of some Bach from his third disc, which has also just won a Gramophone award, and a lovely encore of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ Farewell to Stromness.

So before picking up his Fender Stratocaster, Shibe performed a selection of lute songs on the guitar, all of them sourced from manuscript collections found in Scottish castles and country houses, and evidence of the wide European connections of the noble families who gathered them.

When he goes electric, we crossed the Atlantic for Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, where the soloist is accompanied by pre-recorded tracks of himself playing, and then Julia Wolfe’s LAD, originally scored for nine bagpipers and arranged by Shibe using the same multi-layered technique, with an e-bow and bottleneck slide on the top line.

Reich himself has praised Shibe’s version of the work he wrote for Pat Metheny, while the Wolfe is not only a more practical proposition as an electric guitar work, but also acquires another layer of resonance in the hands of the young Scot - the massed pipes and drums of the annual Tattoo in his native Edinburgh inevitably brought to mind when it reaches full volume.

The cathedral’s resident instrument also makes a fair din in the right hands, and organist Aaron Hawthorne unleashed its full might in his live soundtrack to the 1925 silent movie version of The Phantom of the Opera, with Lon Chaney in the title role.

Screened in a sparingly colourised and crystal clear print, director Rupert Julian’s horror classic is a surprisingly complex and multilayered work, and Hawthorne put in a remarkable shift bringing it sonically to life, with the crucial assistance of soprano Rosie Lavery. She supplies not just the voice of Christine, the young diva at the heart of the tale, but also her terrified emotional reaction as events unfold.

Hawthorne and Lavery take their compact Phantom on tour this month, with dates in St John’s Kirk, Perth, Summerlee Museum in Coatbridge and Glasgow’s Pollokshaws Burgh Hall.