When Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe and Lebanese-American tenor Karim Sulayman first met at the Marlboro Music Festival in America, they worked together on Benjamin’s Britten’s song cycle Songs from the Chinese. That sparked a 10-year conversation about the intermingling of West and East in art which ultimately led to Broken Branches, an album which, Sulayman tells Apple Music Classical, focuses on “how to present ideas of nationality, ethnicity, othering and fetishising people based on their point of origin.” Britten’s cycle is, Sulayman adds, “a real linchpin” of the new album, which also features Britten’s fellow English composers John Dowland and Jonathan Harvey. The traditional Sephardic melody “La Prima Vez”, the Arab-Andalusian muwashshah “Lamma Bada Yatathanna” and Sayed Darwish’s “El Helwa Di” lend a fascinating pan-national context, all the more moving thanks to Sulayman’s and Shibe’s exquisitely sensitive performances. Also central to the album is the duo’s take on “Li Beirut” by the iconic Lebanese singer Fairuz. “I grew up on Fairuz—she was always playing in the car when my mother would drive me anywhere,” Sulayman explains. “Fairuz took the melody of ‘Li Beirut’ from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, but with text and linguistic inflection she creates a singular song that has become an anthem about the Lebanese spirit and its people’s resilience.” In casting its chronological net widely, Broken Branches seeks to “highlight how everything is informing the thing that comes after and how music really exists beyond borders, language and nationality,” Sulayman says. “When I look at my experiences as a first-generation Arab in America, and what my parents dealt with in fleeing a war, and where I’m at in my career as a singer, I look at all this music with a lot of gratitude, and how it’s gotten me through a lot.”