Songs of exile, songs of home: Sulayman and Shibe build a programme of returns at Wigmore Hall

On the evening of 14 July 2026, the lights at Wigmore Hall went down on a programme built like a memory. Karim Sulayman, the Lebanese-American tenor whose recordings have done more than any single album in the last decade to bring the early-modern songbook out of the conservatory and into the living room, walked on stage with the British guitarist Sean Shibe and opened with a piece written by a man who had lost his city and refused to let the loss have the last word. The pair's recital, mounted under the title Broken Branches, ran the better part of two hours and ranged from a seventeenth-century lament for Beirut to a Purcell counter-tenor scena to Britten's slightly shopworn, still devastating cabaret set The Holy Sonnets of John Donne.

What this publication keeps coming back to, on a week with little else to argue about in the arts pages, is the question of what a recital is supposed to do in 2026. The form is old. The hall is older. The canon most of the repertoire draws on was assembled, edited, and in places invented, by institutions that did not always have singers like Sulayman in mind. Broken Branches, in the shape it took on Tuesday, is an argument that the canon is more porous than its caretakers like to admit, and that the way to prove it is to put the music in the mouth of someone who refuses to perform deference.

Songs that remember a city that isn't there

The first half of the evening was, on paper, a survey of lute-song and its early-modern cousins. In practice it read as a single long meditation on leaving. Sulayman opened with a setting of a Palestinian text in which a man describes his home, and then describes the moment at which the describing starts to fail. Shibe accompanied him on a modern copy of a theorbo-lute, the kind of long-necked instrument that Mediterranean players would have recognised in the 1600s. The pair then moved into Monteverdi's Lamento della Ninfa and on into a sequence of Sephardic love songs whose texts move, with the diasporas that produced them, between Castilian, Arabic, Hebrew and Ladino.

The programme's spine, for any reader who has tracked Sulayman's work since his breakout recordings of Monteverdi and his 2019 album Songs of Orpheus with the violinist Jeannette Sorrell, is the refusal to treat the early-modern repertoire as a sealed European object. He sings Cavalli in the same breath as a song that has been carried for centuries in the mouths of Sephardic women, and the audience is invited to notice that the breath is the same breath. On Tuesday the gambit landed without the air of a thesis. The songs simply came, and the connections between them were allowed to do their own work.

Shibe, who over the last five years has built a reputation as one of the more thoughtful recital guitarists of his generation, was the evening's secret weapon. He played the theorbo-lute, the modern classical guitar and, in the Britten, a small-bodied instrument tuned down a semitone to give the singer a darker frame. The transitions between the three were managed with a casualness that is very difficult to fake. The two musicians spoke to each other across the stage the way musicians speak when they have done this for long enough that the rehearsal-room has stopped mattering.

A voice that refuses to be a museum

The interesting thing about Sulayman as an artist, and the thing most likely to divide a Wigmore Hall audience, is that he does not pretend to neutrality. He programmes. He curates. He writes sleeve notes that read like essays. In a recital form that still, in 2026, treats singers as a kind of living instrument on which the canon is performed, he insists on being a co-author of what gets performed. The result on Tuesday was a programme that had a politics to it without ever becoming a lecture.

The most pointed moment came in the second half, with a setting of a Mahmoud Darwish poem that Sulayman has been carrying in recital for several seasons. He introduced it in a few words. The audience went quiet. The music was, by the standards of a Wigmore Hall recital, almost ostentatiously simple. That is the trick of the song, and of Sulayman's work more broadly: the architecture is in the text, and the singer's job is to keep the architecture visible.

The Guardian's review of the recital, filed on 15 July 2026, captured the same quality. The piece reads as the reaction of a critic who came in expecting a programme and was handed, instead, a sustained argument about who the lute-song tradition belongs to in 2026. The argument was not announced. It was sung.

The Britten that wasn't the point, and was

The recital closed with Britten's The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, the composer's 1945 settings of Donne's violent, God-haunted metaphysical poems. The set is a hard sing. Donne's texts do not so much as ask the tenor to be dignified as dare him to survive them. Sulayman sang them with the kind of restraint that makes the moments when restraint breaks, the "Batter my heart" climax, the "Death, be not proud" turn, land with a force that more demonstrative singers flatten.

It is worth saying that the Britten, in this context, was the least interesting thing on the programme, and that this is a measure of how much interesting material the first half had offered. The Holy Sonnets are an old vehicle for British tenors, and Sulayman sang them well, but they sat at the end of a recital whose centre of gravity was somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. If there is a critique to be made of the evening, it is that Britten's set is, by 2026, so encrusted with the tradition of the British song recital that a programme built on unsettling that tradition might have been better served by ending earlier, and harder.

The encore, which the Guardian's review notes, was a return to the Sephardic repertoire, and the room went with it. A Wigmore Hall audience that had been respectfully quiet through the Darwish and the Monteverdi laughed in the right places, and was still humming on the way out.

What a recital is for

What the evening ultimately argued, and what this publication thinks is worth naming plainly, is that the lute-song recital in 2026 is not a museum. It is a workshop. The instruments have changed since Cavalli's time. The bodies that play them have changed far more. The texts have been carried across oceans by people who were not always welcome at the institutions that now preserve them, and the recitals that take that seriously, rather than treating it as a courtesy, are the recitals that feel like they are doing something.

Sulayman and Shibe will tour this programme through the autumn, with dates announced at the Wigmore Hall. In a season otherwise crowded with the usual suspects, it is the kind of recital that reminds a London audience what it has been paying for.

This piece was written by a staff writer. Monexus has covered the lute-song revival as a sustained story across 2024 and 2025; Tuesday's recital was treated, in framing, as a continuation of that coverage rather than as an isolated event.