“I don’t know if you can hear the helicopters overhead,” guitarist Sean Shibe said as he introduced his encore. The helicopters were policing a Black Lives Matter demonstration just down the road from the Wigmore Hall. Shibe’s encore was a guitar arrangement of Peter Maxwell Davies’ “Farewell to Stromness,” a piece of protest music written in response to a uranium mining operation on Orkney. “Max was a very political composer,” Shibe explained. “I think he’d be in tune with the times now.”
Lived Experience
Nicholas Daniel’s Plan to Reform British Classical Music
