Obituary, Julian Bream (1933-2020)

The extraordinary British guitarist and lutenist, who catalysed a widespread revival of interest in both instruments and inspired a huge body of new music for guitar, has died aged 87.

Bream was born in Battersea in 1933, and developed a love for the guitar at an early age through listening to radio broadcasts and to his father, an accomplished amateur jazz guitarist; Django Reinhardt, whose playing captivated him in childhood, proved a lifelong source of joy, and the recordings of Andrés Segovia inspired him to pursue a career as a classical guitarist. Bream received his first guitar as an eleventh birthday present, and only two years later gave his debut public recital in Cheltenham.

Though he received support from Boris Perott of the Philharmonic Society of Guitarists in his teens, and was also personally endorsed by Segovia upon applying for music scholarships, Bream was largely self-taught - as guitar was not offered as a principal study when he enrolled at the Royal College of Music in 1949, he instead studied cello, piano and composition, making his Wigmore Hall debut as a guitarist whilst still a student.

Upon leaving the RCM, Bream spent most of his National Service in the Royal Artillery Band, which allowed him to continue playing gigs on the side; in the years that followed he took on a wide variety of session, commercial and radio work whilst establishing his solo career. It was around this time that Bream began to champion the lute (then virtually obsolete in concert-halls), having acquired an instrument in 1947 via a sailor his father bumped into on the Charing Cross Road, and in 1960 he formed the Julian Bream Consort, which went on to win a Grammy for their recording Evening of Elizabethan Music in 1963.

Alongside his pioneering work in early music in the 1950s, Bream was also already cultivating fruitful relationships with living composers and inspiring new repertoire for the guitar: whilst he was still a teenager he had premiered Reginald Smith Brindle’s Nocturne (which he went on to record for RCA) in an early recital, and a meeting with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears at the 1952 Aldeburgh Festival sparked long-term friendships and artistic collaborations with both men. He and Pears toured extensively together with lute songs by Purcell, Dowland and others, and in 1957 the two premiered Britten’s Songs from the Chinese, now widely regarded as one of the finest of all song-cycles for voice without piano. Six years later Britten composed his Nocturnal after John Dowland (inspired by Come, Heavy Sleep, which often appeared on Pears and Bream’s recital-programmes) for Bream, who later admitted that the piece’s formidable technical demands had almost defeated him, but his Aldeburgh premiere of the work in 1964 quickly established it as one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable compositions for the instrument.

A slew of major commissions from high-profile composers followed, including concertos by Malcolm Arnold, Lennox Berkeley and Leo Brouwer, sonatas by Michael Berkeley, Richard Rodney Bennett, Peter Maxwell Davies and Hans Werner Henze, Walton’s Five Bagatelles, Takemitsu’s All in Twilight, and Tippett’s The Blue Guitar. Bream also recorded a vast amount of core repertoire (chiefly for RCA, with whom he enjoyed a four-decade relationship), winning Grammys for a recital of Baroque guitar music in 1967, a Villa-Lobos disc with André Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra in 1971, and an album of duets, Julian and John, with his younger contemporary John Williams the following year.

Other awards and honours included an OBE in 1964, a CBE in 1985, the Villa-Lobos Gold Medal in 1976, the Royal Philharmonic Society Instrumental Award in 1996, and Gramophone’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017. Bream’s last official recital took place in Norwich in 2002, shortly after a Wigmore Hall concert marking the fiftieth anniversary of his debut there; he continued to play informally for friends and family until 2011, when he sustained injuries in an encounter with a boisterous dog whilst out walking. (The damage to his hand in a car accident in the mid-1980s had caused only a brief interruption to his career, though the technical work required to navigate the injury was intensive and draining). In his retirement, Bream enjoyed cricket, walking and revisiting his beloved Reinhardt recordings, and in 2008 he established the Julian Bream Foundation to provide financial support to emerging young guitarists and to commission further new works for the instrument.

Bream died at home in the Wiltshire village of Donhead St Andrew this morning. The guitarists Xuefei Yang, Heike Matthiesen and Sean Shibe were among those who paid tribute to his artistry on social media.

Julian Bream - a selected discography