Lebanese-American tenor Karim Sulayman has garnered international attention as a sophisticated and versatile artist, praised for his “lucid, velvety tenor and pop-star charisma” (BBC Music Magazine). The 2019 Best Classical Solo Vocal GRAMMY® Award winner, he continues to earn acclaim for his original and innovative programming and recording projects, while regularly performing on the world’s stages in opera, orchestral concerts, recital and chamber music.
Recently Mr. Sulayman was presented by Carnegie Hall for a sold out solo recital debut followed immediately by the world premiere of his own multidisciplinary production, Unholy Wars, a baroque pasticcio centered around the Crusades and the Middle East, at Spoleto Festival USA. He’s also made recent debuts Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, Stockholm’s Drottningholms Slottsteater, Houston Grand Opera, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, and the Chicago, National and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras. He debuted at Wigmore Hall in concerts of French chamber music with his frequent collaborators, the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, which The Arts Desk named to its “Best Performances of 2022.”
Last season saw performances of his acclaimed program with guitarist Sean Shibe, Broken Branches, at Ravinia Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Festival, CAP-UCLA, Boston Celebrity Series and the Phillips Collection, and debuts at Opera Philadelphia (Unholy Wars) and New World Symphony (Britten’s Nocturne). He made his role debut as Grimoaldo in Handel’s Rodelinda (Hudson Hall), created the role of Crow in the world premiere of Layale Chaker/Lisa Schlesinger’s Ruinous Gods (Spoleto Festival USA), and debuted at the Royal Opera House, reprising the title role of Giant, a role he created the previous year for the Aldeburgh Festival. This season and future engagements include the protagonist in the world premiere of David T. Little’s highly anticipated monodrama What Belongs to You (based on Garth Greenwell’s acclaimed novel), written for Sulayman and Alarm Will Sound and directed by Mark Morris, his role debut as Pelléas in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, a reprisal of his celebrated portrayal of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, and concerts at Park Avenue Armory, Wigmore Hall and Hong Kong’s Premiere Performances.
Mr. Sulayman won the 2019 GRAMMY® Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for his debut solo album, Songs of Orpheus (Avie Records), his original program of early Italian Baroque songs and arias. His second solo album, Where Only Stars Can Hear Us (Avie Records), a program of Schubert Lieder with fortepianist Yi-heng Yang, debuted at #1 on the Billboard Traditional Classical Chart and has received international critical acclaim, including being named “Critic’s Choice” by Opera News and included in the New York Times’ Best Classical Music of 2020. His third album, Broken Branches (Pentatone) with Sean Shibe, was named one of the Best Classical Music Albums of 2023 by the New York Times, and was nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY® Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal album.
Mr. Sulayman has been featured on PBS Great Performances, and he appeared on the second season of Dickinson on Apple TV+. In November 2016, Karim created a social experiment/performance art piece called I Trust You, designed to build bridges in a divided political climate. A video version of this experiment went “viral” on the internet, and was honored as a prize winner at the My Hero Film Festival.
A former BBC New Generation Artist, Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship 2012 winner, Royal Philharmonic Society 2018 Young Artist Award winner and recipient of the 2022 Leonard Bernstein Award, Sean Shibe continues to prove himself a truly original mind at the frontier of contemporary classical music. This season sees him premiere new concertos by Cassandra Miller and Oliver Leith, as well as tour Thomas Adès’s first work for a non-keyboard solo instrument. He also appears in recital at iconic venues across Europe including Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Philharmonie de Paris, Konzerthaus Wien and Wigmore Hall as he takes up the title of ECHO Rising Star. Further highlights comprise a US 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 with Delyana Lazorova and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
Recent seasons have seen Shibe perform at 92NY, Southbank Centre, Konzerthaus Dortmund, Liszt Academy, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Musashino City Hall and regularly at Wigmore Hall. He has also played at numerous festivals such as Aldeburgh Festival, Heidelberger Frühling, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Mozartfest Würzburg and Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival.
Ever keen to explore new cooperative dynamics, Shibe regularly collaborates with soloists and ensembles alike. In recent years, he has worked with the Hallé, National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, BBC Singers, Manchester Collective, Dunedin Consort, Quatuor Van Kujik, Danish String Quartet, LUDWIG, Krzysztof Urbański, Christoph Eschenbach, Taavi Oramo, Catherine Larsen-Maguire, flautist Adam Walker, singers Allan Clayton, Ben Johnson, Robert Murray, Robin Tritschler and performance artist Marina Abramović.
Shibe is an ardent supporter of contemporary music, regularly taking a hands-on approach to new commissions and programmes and working with composers to experiment with and expand the guitar repertoire. 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, Shibe’s discography continues to garner recognition from critics and audiences all over. Most recently, his solo album Lost & Found was awarded the OPUS Klassik 2023 Award for Solo Instrument, adding to his OPUS Klassik 2021 Award for Chamber Music Recording, 2019 Gramophone Concept Album of the Year Award and 2021 Gramophone Instrumental Award for softLOUD and Bach respectively. His discography continues to expand in new directions with the release of his latest album Broken Branches, a kaleidoscopic exploration of everything from seventeenth-century lute to Arabic oud in collaboration with Karim Sulayman. Shibe is currently signed to Pentatone.
Born in Edinburgh in 1992, Shibe studied at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland under Allan Neave. He studied further at Kunst-Universität Graz in Austria, in Italy under Paolo Pegoraro, and is now a Guitar Professor at Guildhall School of Music and Drama.