Bream, who was renowned for classical guitar work, dies

Julian Bream, whose concerts and recordings on both lute and classical guitar brought a huge new audience of listeners and players to those instruments, died Friday at his home in Wiltshire, England. He was 87.

The death was announced in a statement from James Brown Management, his representative. The cause was not disclosed.

Over the course of a career that spanned more than half a century, Bream helped revive interest in the lute, a sort of forerunner of the modern guitar, and assembled a repertoire of pieces that had been neglected since the Tudor era but are now played regularly in concerts and schools.

Bream’s influence on the guitar was even more profound. Writing in the New York Daily News, critic Terry Teachout recalled the days when acoustic guitar recitals consisted of “fluff: second-rate Spanish pieces, miscellaneous arrangements and transcriptions, encore-type lollipops.”

“Today, classical guitarists have a huge repertoire of challenging music on which to draw, much of it — including most of the best of it — either discovered or commissioned by Bream,” he continued.

Bream had always seen himself as part of a continuing tradition and regularly expressed his belief that “the future of the guitar is every bit as important as its past.” And so he commissioned or played first performances of music from many of the leading composers of his time, including Malcolm Arnold, William Walton, Hans Werner Henze,

Michael Tippett, Peter Maxwell Davies and Toru Takemitsu.

Benjamin Britten created his celebrated “Nocturnal” (1963) with Bream in mind: It is a set of variations on “Come, Heavy Sleep,” a theme by the Elizabethan composer John Dowland, that is finally played in its original form at the conclusion of the 16-minute piece.

Up until the late 1970s, few classical conservatories offered instruction in guitar, in part because of its close association with pop music. Bream, who was largely self-taught, admired the instrument specifically because “it cuts across the whole gamut, from classical to pop and folk.”

“It’s also got something exotic and mysterious about it which is appealing in an unexotic and unmysterious age,” he told the Times of London in 1967. “It’s like a quiet small voice. You have to be very lucid to clarify everything and get it across to people. It’s the antithesis of someone yelling themselves hoarse to make themselves understood.”

Bream recorded prolifically, mostly for RCA, for which he made more than 35 discs. Most of these were reissued in 2013 in honor of his 80th birthday. He won four Grammy Awards between 1964 and 1974 and was a finalist on 20 other occasions.

“I enjoy having a large audience, but I don’t do anything special to attract them,” Bream told The Washington Post in 1980. “In the selection of repertoire, for example. I play what I like and hope that others will enjoy it — but if they don’t, it doesn’t worry me much. I’m really playing for myself and inviting or allowing others to listen. That’s the kind of instrument the guitar is.”