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An Interview with Julian Bream by Nick Morgan

The artistry of Britain’s first and foremost classical guitarist has beendocumented on dozens of LPs and CDs, television and radioprogrammes – but never before have any of Julian Bream’s many BBCbroadcasts been commercially available. Now retired from the rigoursof concert-giving, after 55 busy years, Bream has had the time to pickthe most important of his BBC archive treasures for this release.

He has also started writing his memoirs and collaborated on amarvellous DVD biography, directed by Paul Balmer for Music on EarthProductions (www.musiconearth.co.uk). This self-portrait, compre-hensive, lavishly illustrated and engaging, demands to be seen: Bream’slively reminiscences are delivered to camera in his inimitable manner,bluff, droll but vivid and pointed (and garnished with mouth-wateringextras, of which more below).

Until you see it, some bare facts from Bream’s life: born in Batterseain 1933, Julian was first taught the guitar by his father, studied atLondon’s Royal College of Music – but not the guitar, which wasn’ttaught there – and then, with single-minded determination, embarkedon a career unprecedented in British music, which only ended in May2002, with his retirement. Bream has enriched the guitar’s repertoirewith many commissions and rediscoveries, though without this releaseand Balmer’s DVD, two of his most important BBC recordings mighthave been lost. Bream also brought the lute back before the public,probably the widest it’s ever enjoyed in this country, and helped reviveElizabethan and Jacobean consort music.

After a serious health scare, from which Bream has recovered,thanks to daily walks on the Dorset downs with his flat-coated retriever,Django, he is enjoying life out of the limelight in his country home offorty years; and there, last summer, he shared his memories of nearlyhalf a century of broadcasting.

What role did the BBC play in your career? ‘A very strong one. Theywere in fact my first real employers in my youth. It was very hard to makea living playing the classical guitar, because nobody had heard one –some people had heard of Segovia but he was a Spaniard and theyconsidered it a natural thing for him to do, as a Spaniard, to play theguitar. To make a career, for myself, was almost impossible. But the BBCemployed me in all sorts of ways. They had three networks, the Home,the Light and the Third, and for the Light Programme they had a roster ofmusicians that they employed full time to play light music – mostly SouthAmerican apache music! The band consisted of an accordion, clarinetand flute, plus a little string sextet, piano, guitar and bass. And, inbetween, they employed me, playing solos, and I used to play quite often– pieces by Albéniz, Granados, perhaps a bit of Sor and Turina – it wasalways classical, whereas the band around me was playing light music,but somehow it fitted in and it was all part of my feeling that seriousmusic is quite acceptable even when you’ve got light, entertaining musicaround it. In fact, it adds another musical dimension to the programme.And that’s how my name gradually became known, because in thosedays you’d do a broadcast on the radio and six to seven million peoplemight well hear it – tremendous! And then I would get the odd littlerecital on the Home Service; and when the Third Programme started up,there was suddenly a great interest in early music. I didn’t have a lute inthose days but I played lute pieces on the guitar until I eventuallyacquired a lute. On one day, I well remember, I played on all threenetworks!’

How did you feel coming back to tapes you presumably hadn’t heardfor years? ‘I thought they had a quality that some of my commercial

recordings didn’t have – a certain spontaneity. Quite often – though notall the time – the early stuff was done live: the old red light went on andyou were on! And when you pre-recorded, what you wanted to get downwas the essence of the performance – as perfectly, technically speaking,as you could – but it was the musical essence which was the first priorityand if there was a slight flaw, that wasn’t necessarily a disaster. Whereas itis – or it can be – very annoying if it’s on a commercial recording, I thinkthat’s the difference.’

You used to find that quite constraining in commercial sessions? ‘Yes Idid, I did. And that’s why my producer was so important; if I was beingconstrained, he would jolly well tell me! And I’d go back to square one.’

So it’s good to have this record of your less constrained self? ‘Yes,because a performance is a performance, it’s your thoughts on that workat that time in your life – and also, playing on different guitars, in differentrecording studios, it becomes a kaleidoscope of your work.’

You’ve recorded the Chaconne from Bach’s D minor Partita for soloviolin twice, commercially, at either end of your career – where doesthis BBC studio recording, made for Radio Three’s series The ClassicalGuitar, fit in? ‘It’s the middle years – I hadn’t made a commercialrecording of the Chaconne since 1957. So I burnished it up specially forthat programme – my aim was to do something for that programme thatwas special and serious. It’s fascinating because your ideas do changebut, even in the very early recording I made [for Westminster] in 1957,somehow it’s all there – in embryo. What life has done in the years sinceis given me further insights and those insights largely develop withexperience. That performance is a transitional performance, some way towhere I think I got it in the 1990s, in the last commercial recording [forEMI] – that has most of the things that I’d wanted to say in the Chaconne.It’s such a great piece and there are many problems that you have tosolve, some specific to the guitar and some specific to the music.Phrasing on the guitar is not always as easy or as conventional as youmay think because, from the moment that the string is plucked, the sounddecays and you are faced with a lot of silences. And those silences, therelationships between them, have their own poetry – some you make alittle longer, some you play absolutely accurately, some you may shortena bit. So you have a whole set of problems most other musicians don’thave to grapple with but which I personally find very exciting, verystimulating to solve and bring to a poetic conclusion.’

The instrument Bream plays the Bach on was made to an old designin a workshop near his home, where he gave young and unknownmakers a chance to perfect their craft: ‘I’ve always liked old-fashionedguitars, late-19th Century ones, very lightly built – they have a soul thatmost modern guitars don’t have. It’s not because of the age, it’s simply thedesign. The guitar is a very quiet, intimate instrument and, over the pastthirty to forty years, players have demanded a louder, more brilliantinstrument. The guitar makers have complied to some extent but, in doingso, I think they’ve lost a certain quality which is the guitar – admittedly,with faults. The old-fashioned instruments aren’t even – some notes arebetter than others (that happens on many instruments actually) – but a lotof younger guitarists are irritated by that, they want them all to be equal.If they are all the same, you arrive, really, at a very bland response fromthe instrument, certainly not very exciting. When you play an old-fashioned guitar, which has a few notes that aren’t so strong, you have touse a little more left hand pressure and perhaps a little extra vibrato oryou pluck it at a different part of the string – there are all sorts of ways ofdoing things which you cannot teach, you’ve got to have an instinct forthese things. But, on the other hand, the modern instruments are verymuch easier to play and I suppose that’s life: people like good technologyand there’s nothing wrong with that!’

One of your many visits to the Edinburgh Festival is commmemoratedin Fernando Sor’s Variations on what is always billed as Mozart’s ‘O2

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cara armonia’ but is in fact ‘Das klingt so herrlich’, the song forMonostatos and the slaves in the Act 1 finale of The Magic Flute, sung asPapageno’s bells are working their spell. ‘Sor obviously loved The MagicFlute and he made a number of arrangements of other airs from it. Healso liked variation form very much. And, as a set of variations, I believeit to be a modest masterpiece for the guitar, because the instrumentalideas are very original and, for their time, highly developed. Theproportions of these variations and of the phrases are very elegant; thereare moments of pathos but there’s a lot of very subtle and charmingvariation within the variations and nothing’s overstated – it’s veryMozartian in that way, it’s note-perfect and it’s also one of the finestcompositions Sor wrote.

‘Now, when you go from the Sor [recorded at the Edinburgh Festivalin 1982] to the Sonatina by Turina - [a 1956 studio recording] – it’sa different world, as if another person were playing. I was a veryimpetuous performer when I made that recording but it’s ratherrefreshing, it had an immediacy which I lost, to some extent, as I gotolder. It has its blemishes but that, I think, is overridden by the fact thatthere’s something very spontaneous about the performance and that’show I used to play in those days. I’ve been re-studying the Sonatina,recently, and it’s an extraordinary thing, that after all these years, I’vefound new ways of doing things and, actually, the way I’d do it now, Ithink, is to some extent more convincing – but it’s taken all those years ofexperience to know instinctively what to do.’

The instrument Bream plays the Turina on was ‘made by a friend ofmine, Hector Quine, who was an amateur maker, eventually Professor ofGuitar at the Royal Academy of Music in London – he built it on hisbedroom table! It had a certain bell like quality that I liked at that time. Ididn’t play it for very long but it was different from any other guitar that Iplayed. You see, in those days, certainly in England, it was very hard tofind a really good guitar.’

Perhaps the most historic document on this CD is Sir MichaelTippett’s The Blue Guitar - , the composer’s response both to a poemof the same name by Wallace Stevens and to the famous painting byPicasso which inspired Wallace, The Man with the Blue Guitar, whoseessence is contained in the first stanza:

The man bent over his guitarA shearsman of sorts. The day was green.They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,You do not play things as they are.’The man replied, ‘Things as they areAre changed upon the blue guitar.’

Tippett’s only composition for solo guitar was written at JulianBream’s instigation and with his advice, though it was commissioned bythe Ambassador International Cultural Foundation in Pasadena,California, where it was first played by Bream on 9 November, 1983. It isdedicated to the American conductor Calvin Simmons (1950-1982) whodied in a boating accident. Tippett was essentially stimulated by threemoods or gestures which he used as the titles for the movements:

Transforming: ‘Being the lion in the luteBefore the lion locked in stone.’Dreaming: ‘Morning is not sun,It is this posture of the nerves.’Juggling: ‘The old fantocheHanging his shawl upon the wind.’

‘Originally, the piece ended with Dreaming. Then the composer andmyself had second thoughts on the movement order and Juggling becamethe last movement [and is played last here]. Much later Tippett had third

thoughts and he decided to come back to the original scheme.’You never recorded The Blue Guitar commercially? ‘At the time I was

performing it, my recording company, RCA, was in the middle ofnegotiations for a take-over bid, so it was very difficult to get them toaccept a new, contemporary piece. And then another guitarist recorded it,Eleftheria Kotzia – quite a good recording too, as a matter of fact! – andthen another [Norbert Kraft] and I thought, well that’s fine, it’s beenrecorded. Then I went off the boil; as I often do with a new work, I’d playit like mad and then I’d let it rest and then I’d re-study it, perhaps a fewyears later. And so there was the Tippett as well as the Richard RodneyBennett Sonata, which circumstances also prevented me from recordingcommercially – they’re the two performances that would have been, as itwere, lost in the cracks.’

But here, at last, is your world première broadcast of The Blue Guitar– recorded without an audience in the BBC’s large orchestral studio inMaida Vale – while Bennett’s Sonata has also been restored to circulation,by Music on Earth Productions, as a sound-only bonus track on yourDVD biography: ‘I’m very pleased about that because I think the BennettSonata is a very fine piece and fantastically well written for theinstrument, so that recording hasn’t got lost. And the Tippett’s not losteither, so I’m delighted that these two fine works are now available,performed by their dedicatee.’

Commissions were one way in which you enlarged the guitar’srepertoire and scope; another was transcriptions and arrangements.Among the latter, there can’t be many as substantial or as long in themaking as your reworking of Schubert’s Quartet in G minor D.173 -

– again, never recorded commercially. ‘Transcriptions? I find themvery stimulating. And certain pieces have been ongoing transcriptionsthroughout my life, I come back to them from time to time and makeminor adjustments. But the reason why I did the Schubert was, in my lateteens, I was walking down London’s Wigmore Street one Sundayafternoon, past the Wigmore Hall, and I saw there was a concert by theAmadeus Quartet. So I just got a ticket and went in, and I heard this littleG minor Quartet [transposed, here, into A minor] and then I thought,“Yes, that would sound quite good on two guitars!” Many years later Ibought a record of it and I was convinced it would sound very well ontwo guitars but it was trying to find the time to do this. Because what Iwanted to do was to make two equal guitar parts – and that was in itselffun to do, stimulating.

‘And so I didn’t think about it any more until, for my fiftieth birthday Ibooked the Wigmore Hall for a concert and I asked several friends to takepart. Amongst others I asked John Williams and he agreed and I felt, well,we can’t just play a bit of our old repertoire, we must have somethingnew, something special. And then I remembered the Schubert quartet – ithad always been in the back of my mind, like certain composers, whohave ideas and then use them about ten years later! I was going off on along tour of Australia & New Zealand just before and I had a brainwave.The flights are so long between London and Sydney, not to mention NewZealand – and on the way back too – that it occurred to me I could useall that time to do this transcription. So that’s what I did. I really enjoyedit, I was so bored normally during these terribly long flights. All throughthe night I was working away and loving it: there I was, manuscript paperall over the place, the passengers couldn’t believe what was going on.D’you know, I completely dismantled that quartet and put it togetheragain and, amazingly, I finished it just as the aircraft touched down inLondon on my way back! John and I tried it out and it seemed to be veryeffective, so we performed it at my fiftieth birthday concert.’

How does the chemistry with John Williams work? ‘The chemistryworks simply, inasmuch as we both adapt to each other. It’s not alwayseasy but it does create a certain creative tension which is rather exciting.We were not a duo, we were two players who came together to make

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music which, in some ways, is much the best thing because, instead oftrying to bring the two instruments together in a blandly unified way, weactually played in our own styles. But we had enough musicianship andsavvy to be able to amalgamate these two styles, so that they made anexciting composite whole.’

But in this Schubert, tension isn’t really the name of the game?‘Sometimes it is in a way, particularly in the third and fourth movements,there’s a lot of toing and froing between the instruments, a sort of cross-banter, which is rather exciting. The first two movements are moreeloquent, of course. It was the last recording we ever made, so it has alittle significance because of that too.’

This is the only piece in this release recorded in Bream’s favouritestudio, a remarkable neo-Classical Roman Catholic chapel at WardourCastle in Wiltshire, near his house: ‘I hated recording in New York. RCAhad studios down on East 23rd Street and they weren’t bad at all, but Ifound the atmosphere in New York too electric. But I then managed topersuade them to let me make my records here, where I wanted to makethem, and that’s when I got my team together, just three of us: my greatproducer, Jimmy Burnett, and wonderful engineer, John Bower, and I alsohad the beautiful chapel just two miles from here, so it was a perfectarrangement – and RCA agreed to that.’

� Nick Morgan, 2005