Ema Nikolovska, Mezzo-Soprano
Sean Shibe, Guitar

Mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska—an arresting young voice known for her emotional directness and fearless programming—and guitarist Sean Shibe, a singular, genre-bending virtuoso equally at home with Renaissance lute music and electric guitar, make their Princeton University Concerts debuts with a program titled “Orlando.” Taking Virginia Woolf’s unruly protagonist as a point of ignition—shadowed by the epic poems Chanson de Roland and Orlando Furioso—they collide centuries with music by Schubert, Dowland, Bob Dylan, Thomas Adès, and Laurie Anderson, splicing the acoustic with the electric and threading in new commissions by Sasha Scott, Cassandra Miller, Linda Catlin-Smith, and Nahre Sol. The result isn’t a tidy narrative but a charged drift through love, fracture, and self-reinvention—music that feels unstable in the best way, held together by Shibe’s razor-edged precision and Nikolovska’s luminous and unguarded voice.