Julian Bream at Aldeburgh on DOREMI

courtesy of Naxos of America

The last time I wrote about the Legendary Treasures series of recordings released on the DOREMI label, it involved a five-CD box set of trio performances by pianist Emil Gilels, violinist Leonid Kogan, and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. At the beginning of this month, as if to give “equal time” to “the West,” DOREMI released a single CD of live performances of the young Julian Bream at two Aldeburgh Festivals. At the first recital, which took place in Great Glemham House on June 7, 1958, Bream was joined by tenor Peter Pears, accompanying him on both lute and guitar. His partner for the second recital at Jubilee Hall on June 23, 1959, was flutist Aurèle Nicolet; and, again, Bream played both lute and guitar.

The first recital was organized around English music from two centuries. The first half of the recital was devoted entirely to John Dowland. The second presented Benjamin Britten’s Opus 58 collection of six songs entitled Songs from the Chinese, followed by three arrangements of British folk songs. The Dowland portion was imaginatively organized to demonstrate how the composer would adapt a single tune for either a vocalist or a lutenist. Those who know Pears best through the intensity he could bring to Britten’s music are likely to appreciate the low-key intimacy of his delivery of the texts Dowland had set. Given that the recital took place only a few years before the 400th anniversary of Dowland’s birth, these were performances that effectively captured the spirit of making music in Renaissance England. The Britten guitar selections, on the other hand, capture both the boldness of the composer’s rhetoric and the twists of irony that he could apply to music from past cultures.

The 1959 recital, on the other hand, offered up a broader spectrum of diversity, most of which was due to arrangement. The opening selection was the TWV 42:D6 trio sonata in D major by Georg Philipp Telemann, originally composed for flute, violin, and continuo. Bream repurposed the violin part for lute to complement Nicolet’s flute playing, and harpsichordist George Malcolm provided the continuo. This is likely to strike most listeners as boldly imaginative, particularly those who expect instruments from the lute family to be relegated to continuo work. In other words this performance delivers early music refracted through a contemporary treatment.

Less idiosyncratic is the selection of waltzes from Franz Schubert’s D. 365 Originaltänze collection of 36. This past November I wrote about guitarist Pablo Márquez accompanying cellist Anja Lechner on her latest ECM album, Die Nacht. In a similar approach, Nicolet provides the “melody line” for each of the selected waltzes; and Bream takes care of everything else on his guitar. My guess is that this struck Aldeburgh listeners in 1959 as highly innovative; but many listeners today have come to appreciate that the guitar can fit comfortably into a variety of Schubert compositions. This recital also included Bream giving a solo performance of Joaquín Turina’s Opus 61 guitar sonata.

Taken as a whole this album offers a throughly engaging account of Bream at the beginning of his career in the context of Britten’s imaginative approach to repertoire in his planning of Aldeburgh Festival programs.