Word: lutanist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Surprisingly, for a burly, blunt-talking child of the London slums, Guitarist-Lutanist Julian Bream seems to have eardrums as fragile as orchid petals. What he calls the "bloody row and chaos" of contemporary life-jangling telephones, whirring machinery, blaring car horns-can make him physically ill. He has been known to get off elevators before arriving at his floor because he found the "treacly tripe" of Muzak so grating. Dubbed "the Phantom" by musician friends because of his penchant for withdrawing into secluded rooms to commune with his gentle-speaking instruments, he would be happy to spend most...
Fresh Air. But the music world will not let him. At 34, Bream is in demand throughout Europe and America as the undisputed successor to the grand master of the classical guitar, Andres Segovia, and as a lutanist already beyond comparison. Without sacrificing stylistic elegance, he draws from both instruments the rustic grace and fresh-air feeling of the English countryside, redeeming them from sentimentality as well as musicological pedantry. To make up for the narrow dynamic range of the guitar, he achieves dramatic effects with an extraordinary variety of tonal colors. Subtle, jazzlike rhythms, throbbing chords, silvery lines, harplike...
...guitar's characteristic aplomb and lucidity. Best of all is his performance of Nocturnal, a 19-minute mood piece written especially for him in 1963 by Benjamin Britten. Spiraling through a set of variations that end rather than begin with the theme (Come, Heavy Sleep, a 1597 air by Lutanist-Composer John Dowland), Bream's guitar muses, churns restlessly, declaims, then drifts over the threshold of silence, leaving the final notes hanging in the air like wisps of smoke...