For anyone passionate about the guitar and lute repertories, Julian Bream’s annual tours used to be highlights of the concert season. His guitar programs invariably included something new, written for him by composers like Britten, Walton, Takemitsu and Hans Werner Henze. And his lute programs helped win an audience for John Dowland and his Elizabethan contemporaries long before Sting set his sights on him. It was a recording by Mr. Bream and the tenor Peter Pears that introduced Sting to this music, and Sting’s successful CD “Songs From the Labyrinth” inspired Sony BMG Masterworks to restore some Bream recordings to the catalog.
They should never have fallen out of print in the first place, and it is shocking that many of Mr. Bream’s classic recordings remain unavailable. Mr. Bream, who turns 74 this month, has gone out of circulation as well. He retired in 2002 after, as he put it, “55 years on the planks.”
For me his absence from New York concert halls since the late 1990s is clear evidence of a decline in the quality of life. Others have also felt it keenly; next season a handful of younger guitarists will present a 75th-birthday tribute concert at the 92nd Street Y. Their focus no doubt will be on Mr. Bream’s contributions to the repertory. But what they won’t be able to convey is the warmth of his sound and his persuasive personality, which came through in his music making and his informative and often amusing comments about the music at hand.
Those qualities are captured vividly in “Julian Bream: My Life in Music,” a 2003 documentary by Paul Balmer that was originally available through guitar collectors’ shops and has now been released on DVD by Avie. Its core is a series of candid, detailed interviews, filmed in England at Aldeburgh and Mr. Bream’s home in Dorset, that are illustrated with documentary materials (family photographs, memorabilia and glimpses of manuscript scores) and performances, both new and archival.
Mr. Bream has mastered the art of autobiographical musing. Rather than reciting his career milestones, he tends to speak in terms of coincidences that moved him from one musical discovery to the next.
A job playing guitar in a Kenneth Tynan production of Shakespeare’s “Othello” at a library in Manchester led him to spend a leisure hour in the stacks, where he happened on a collection of Dowland works in Peter Warlock’s piano arrangements. Immediately taken with the music, he decided that it should be heard on the instrument it was written for, and he had a lute made. From there it was a short leap to the Julian Bream Consort, his pioneering 1950s and ’60s period-instrument band, shown on the DVD in a vintage BBC performance: a zesty reading of Dowland’s “Can She Excuse My Wrongs.”
A central thread is Mr. Bream’s quest to expand the contemporary guitar repertory beyond the mostly Spanish and Latin American composers who wrote for Andrés Segovia. It wasn’t an easy sale. Paul Hindemith declined Mr. Bream’s request for a piece.
He tried unsuccessfully to corner Stravinsky during that composer’s visits to London, or at least to reach him on the telephone. (Once he did. Stravinsky shouted “Who?” and hung up.) And when a Canadian television crew filming Stravinsky at a recording session in 1963 brought him together with Mr. Bream, the meeting was painfully awkward. Stravinsky is seen on the DVD wiggling out of an invitation for a more leisurely discussion, so Mr. Bream tries to win him over on the spot by unpacking his lute and playing Dowland’s “Lachrimae Pavan.” The encounter did not produce the new work Mr. Bream so desperately wanted.
He had better luck with British composers, most notably Britten, whose “Nocturnal” (1963) is unquestionably the greatest work composed for Mr. Bream and is now a centerpiece of the guitar literature. Yet even then persuasion was necessary. Britten was more interested in the lute than in the guitar, so Mr. Bream had to redirect the composer’s attention subtly to the modern instrument. Britten had it both ways: The work is scored for guitar, but it is a set of remarkably picturesque variations on Dowland’s “Come, Heavy Sleep.”
A 2003 performance of the concluding section of “Nocturnal” shows that even after retirement Mr. Bream’s technique and his probing interpretive imagination were intact. The new performances are beautifully filmed; an account of Manuel de Falla’s “Homenaje, Pour le Tombeau de Debussy” focuses entirely on the finger work.
But the real treats are the archival clips. Among the more straightforward are a performance with Mr. Pears of Dowland’s “Fine Knacks for Ladies,” a solo performance of a Bach fugue and an informal but fire-breathing duet with the guitarist John Williams. More surprising are segments showing Mr. Bream and friends starting an evening at a pub and then repairing to his home to play jazz, and a 1962 improvisation with the sarod player Ali Akbar Khan in which Mr. Bream picks up Mr. Khan’s themes with an effortlessness and a fluency that say a lot about his musicianship.
The DVD’s drawbacks are few. Chronology is thrown to the wind at times, and the dates and sources of the television material could have been given more clearly and consistently. The interview segments are indexed, but the performances are nestled within those segments, unindexed. Still, there is plenty to revel in here: the documentary runs 2 hours with another 75 minutes of performances, interviews and other materials among the bonus features.
