DOREMI Releases Third Julian Bream Album

courtesy of Naxos of America

In one of those ironic coincidences, DOREMI released the third of its Legendary Tributes albums of live performances by guitarist Julian Bream two days after I had written about the second of those albums. That previous album consisted of two CDs of “live” recordings taken from both concert performances and broadcasts between 1956 and 1965. Readers may recall that the first of these releases was a single “live” CD of performances at Aldeburgh Festivals in both 1958 and 1959.

The new album is again a single CD of Aldeburgh performances. Most of the release is devoted to a Festival recital on June 11, 1969, taken from “live” BBC broadcasts (complete with announced introductions). However, the last three tracks were recorded at the first Aldeburgh Autumn Chamber Music Festival, which took place in 1977.

The 1969 recital was distinguished by including a world premiere performance. The intermission was followed by a set of five impromptus composed by Richard Rodney Bennett. Equally novel, however, was the opening selection of the album, a sonata by Josef Kohaut.

The BBC announcer may have been reading out of his copy of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians when he described Kohaut as a trumpeter in the Austrian army who deserted and fled to France. What is interesting, however, is that Bream was introduced as playing his own guitar transcription of a flute sonata by Kohaut. The current Grove Music Online Web page, however, describes Kohaut as a lutenist; and the list of his compositions says nothing about any chamber music for flute! Kohaut’s instrumental music was published in Paris during the second half of the eighteenth century, and Bream’s performance definitely reflected both the structure and the rhetoric of chamber music from that period of music history.

Far more interesting is Bream’s performance of Benjamin Britten’s Opus 70, entitled “Nocturnal after John Dowland.” Ironically, this composition was also included in the second album, where it had been recorded at a BBC Studio Recital in 1964. Regular readers probably know by now that this is a “reverse variation form” composition, whose theme is Dowland’s song “Come Heavy Sleep.” However, I cannot quibble with having two different recordings of Bream playing this music (which had been composed for him). The greater my exposure to the piece, the easier it gets to appreciate that gradual emergence of the theme through the overall reverse structure!