A former BBC New Generation Artist, Sean Shibe is a winner of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship in 2012, the Royal Philharmonic Society’s 2018 Young Artist Award, and the 2022 Leonard Bernstein Award. He continues to prove himself as a truly original mind at the frontier of contemporary classical music.

This season, Sean Shibe will premiere new concertos by Cassandra Miller and Oliver Leith, and he’ll tour Thomas Adès’s first work for a non-keyboard solo instrument. As an ECHO Rising Star, he is set to perform recitals at iconic venues across Europe, including the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Philharmonie de Paris, Konzerthaus in Vienna, and Wigmore Hall. Additional highlights include a tour with tenor Karim Sulayman, performances with mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska, and the UK premiere of Francisco Coll’s Turia for guitar and large orchestra, featuring Delyana Lazorova and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

Ever keen to explore new cooperative dynamics, Sean Shibe regularly collaborates with both soloists and ensembles. In recent years, he has worked with the Hallé, the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, BBC Singers, Quatuor Van Kujik, the Danish String Quartet, and conductors such as Krzysztof Urbański, Christoph Eschenbach, and Taavi Oramo. His collaborations also include flautist Adam Walker, and singers Allan Clayton, Ben Johnson, Robert Murray, and Robin Tritschler, as well as performance artist Marina Abramović.

Sean Shibe is an ardent supporter of contemporary music, often taking a hands-on approach to new commissions and programs. He collaborates with composers to experiment with and expand the guitar repertoire. His premieres to date include works by Daniel Kidane, David Fennessy, Shiva Feshareki, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Freya Waley-Cohen, and Sasha Scott. He is equally committed to traditional repertoire, regularly pairing bold new pieces with his own transcriptions of J.S. Bach’s lute suites and seventeenth-century Scottish lute manuscripts.

Often praised for his original programming, Sean Shibe’s discography continues to receive recognition from critics and audiences alike. His latest album, Broken Branches, was nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album, while his solo album Lost & Found won the OPUS Klassik 2023 Award for Solo Instrument. This adds to his previous accolades, including the OPUS Klassik 2021 Award for Chamber Music Recording, the 2019 Gramophone Concept Album of the Year Award, and the 2021 Gramophone Instrumental Award for softLOUD and Bach, respectively. His discography is expanding in new directions with the release of Profesión, which explores 20th-century South American music, following closely on the heels of Broken Branches, a kaleidoscopic exploration of music ranging from seventeenth-century lute to Arabic oud in collaboration with Karim Sulayman. Shibe is currently signed to Pentatone.

Born in Edinburgh in 1992, Sean Shibe studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland under Allan Neave. He furthered his studies at Kunst-Universität Graz in Austria and in Italy under Paolo Pegoraro. Currently, he is a Guitar Professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.