R. I. P. Julian Bream

 The great British guitarist Julian Bream passed away on Friday, aged 87. Slipped Disc has a brief memorial:

Battersea born, he dazzled teachers at the Royal College of Music and, after army service, set up his own consort. He was hugely influential in reviving composers of the Tudor age and his virtuosity attracted new works from Britten, Walton, Tippett, Henze and others.  He made copious recordings on both guitar and lute.

The BBC has a far more comprehensive article, with a few errors:

The virtuoso musician performed globally during his heyday, and was renowned for his recordings of new compositions and masterclasses.

He won four Grammy Awards and received 20 nominations between 1960 and 85.

A self-taught musician, Bream learned playing to radio dance bands with the lute his father bought from a sailor on London's Charing Cross Road in 1947.

As a child prodigy, his early recitals led to him being "acknowledged as one of the most remarkable artists of the post-war era", according to the Royal Academy of Music.

Of course, it wasn't a lute that his father purchased from a sailor in 1947, it was a guitar. And while he was indeed renowned for commissioning and performing new music, he was not known for giving master classes.

The Guardian has a rather better obituary:

It was on hearing a recording of Andrés Segovia that Julian’s love affair with the classical guitar began. Though his father recognised Julian’s musical potential, he visualised his future as being with the piano, on which Julian was by then taking lessons. However, Henry bought a “finger-style” guitar (as it was then commonly known) for Julian on his 11th birthday. In the same year he was given a junior exhibition award to study the piano at the Royal College of Music, with the cello as his second instrument.

Although he gave a groundbreaking demonstration recital there, he was asked not to bring his guitar in by the front door. There was no question of his studying the guitar at the RCM – there was no one capable of teaching him. His first lessons were with Boris Perott, a polymath Russian émigré who founded the Philharmonic Society of Guitarists in London. “They were of cursory value and didn’t do any harm, but I had to unlearn the right-hand technique he taught me,” Bream said. “They may have given me some measure of discipline at a time when I needed it.” 

As an important factor in securing the future of the guitar, he commissioned new works from, among others, Benjamin Britten (Nocturnal After John Dowland, which Bream described as “very nearly beyond me”), William Walton (Five Bagatelles), Malcolm Arnold (Guitar Concerto, Fantasy), Michael Tippett (The Blue Guitar), Hans Werner Henze (Royal Winter Music), Lennox Berkeley (Guitar Concerto, Sonatina, Theme and Variations), Alan Rawsthorne (Elegy), Richard Rodney Bennett (Guitar Concerto, Impromptus, Sonata) and Toru Takemitsu (All in Twilight); many of these have become standard repertory. In this respect he made a greater contribution than any other guitarist of his generation.

Very true, that last. The other great guitarist of the second half of the 20th century was John Williams of both England and Australia, but his commissions were few and of little significance. He was more interested in pop/classical crossover.

The New York Times has an excellent piece:

It could be argued, in fact, that Mr. Bream, even more than Segovia, established the guitar’s credibility as a serious solo instrument. He updated the technical standard of classical guitar playing and replaced the Romantic, rubato-heavy phrasing that Segovia preferred with a more modern style. And he undertook a significant renovation of the repertory.

While Segovia, a Spaniard, devoted himself largely to music that naturally emphasized the guitar’s Spanish and Latin American roots, Mr. Bream showed that the instrument was equally suited to German, French and English works and to some of the thorny contemporary styles that the more conservative Segovia avoided.

Even the Wall Street Journal has a tribute:

Julian Bream’s epitaph will not be hard to write: He ranks alongside Jascha Heifetz and Vladimir Horowitz as the classical musician who more than any other defined the musical horizons for his instrument, and his name will always be recalled with warmth whenever a younger guitarist has occasion to perform one of the pieces that he commissioned. There can be no finer monument.

I heard Julian Bream in concert on four occasions and met him personally after one of those concerts. He was so highly regarded that in 1975, when I was an undergraduate at McGill in Montreal, myself and three other guitar students rented a car and drove all the way to New York just to hear him give a concert at Town Hall. After the concert we just drove all the way back--eight hours. But we considered it well worth it because in those years Montreal wasn't on his tour list. I remember the concert quite well. The first half was on the lute and for some pieces he had the score out and lying on the floor in front of him. He made the joke that as he got older, his memory was poorer, but his eyesight was getting better. The last piece in the first half was rather a train wreck and you might say he abandoned it, rather than brought it to a conclusion. Yes, the thing about Bream recitals was that his technique was a bit unpredictable. One night he would be as good as it gets, but another night and he was pretty shaky. This was one of the latter. But the musicianship was always of the highest quality.

One of the recitals I saw him play in Montreal in the 90s was sheer perfection in every aspect. I particularly recall one of his encores, El Mestre, a Catalan folksong arrangement by Miguel Llobet, that was simply transcendent. I cannot imagine it better played. In contrast, the last time I saw him, also in Montreal in the early 90s and I think his final tour, was again rather shaky with some Bach that was both tense and jittery.

I met him backstage after a concert in Victoria, BC, in the 80s, another fine performance. We talked about the availability of his recent recordings. I have met many of the guitar greats, either in master classes or after performances: these include Narciso Yepes, John Williams, Pepe Romero, Manuel Barrueco and quite a few others. With few exceptions I am always struck by noticing that the great guitarists are all about two or three inches shorter than I am. I think that helps!

Julian Bream, along with John Williams, was my great influence as a young guitarist. I awaited every recording with breathless anticipation. With Bream, it was often the new pieces he commissioned, but also his revival of great works by Fernando Sor and Mauro Giuliani. The breadth of repertoire he made his own, for the lute as well as the guitar, was impressive. But in some ways, John Williams was the more important influence for me. His Bach was better than anyone else's on guitar and his integral recording of all the lute suites was an absolute revelation. His concerto performances, with the exception of Pepe Romero's of the Aranjuez, were also beyond compare. Julian Bream was really not a strong concerto player. The other area where I give the edge, though just barely, to John Williams, was in Spanish repertoire. Julian Bream recorded more of it and did so very well, but there was just something magical about Williams' performances.

I think what it ultimately came down to was that Williams, from an early age, had excellent instrumental instruction, first from his father, an amateur guitarist, and then from Segovia. The self-taught background of Bream shows itself, in my opinion, in the stress and strain that seems to underly his performances. Mind you, in contemporary repertoire this works to his advantage as Williams sounds rather too relaxed sometimes!

I studied for a few years with a student of Julian Bream's--he had very, very few private students. From what I was told, studying with Bream was rather like Marine boot camp: first he tore you down and then he built you up again, but it seemed to me that the second part of that process was less successful than the first part.

A final thought: the great successes that Bream achieved, entirely well-earned, are likely no longer possible for a classical guitarist. That is how much the business has changed. A superb performer like Marcin Dylla will likely never win or even be nominated for a Grammy. The wages of commercialization...

For an envoi, one of Bream's great performances, the Passacaglia from Britten's Nocturnal: