This arrived today. Disc one is currently playing.
I’m planning to watch as much of the Julian Bream BBC TV Master Class stuff as I can find. And it was watching a bit of one of them that prompted me to buy this 3-CD set, of his early recorded works.
I’m hyper-exhausted today. Which is quite common for me these days. It’s never pleasant. But at least I can lie back, relax, and enjoy this sublime music. Indeed, the beauty of it is a balm.
The CD player appears to be stuck in a looping mode. When CDs end, they simply start playing again. Actually I don’t mind this at all. As the music on our CD player is always the best, auto-repeat is something of a boon!
One thing struck me, very forcibly, just now, as disc one of this wonderful set auto-restarted, was Bream’s command of nuanced tone/expression. Which, funnily enough, was something he was talking about, and demonstrating – alongside a very gifted student – on the Master Class episode I recently watched on the BBC iPlayer.
This consists of such things as touch – the soft parts of fingers, or the nails, for example (affecting volume/tone) – the position of the left hand – over the sound-hole, or closer to the bridge (again, affecting both tone and volume, albeit in subtly differing ways), and then how the left hand holds the notes, which – combined with the right – gives control over attack/release.
False harmonics, tapping or thumping (or whatever) the body of the guitar. There are so many things one can do. These latter are things more modern guitarists have taken to creative extremes in recent years. But Bream demonstrates in his playing a much older deeper tradition, of expressivity, that’s always been inherent in all great music.
Five records are combined over three CDs: four for the Westminster label, and one on RCA. Disc one, still playing as I type this, is all Spanish composers, and draws on his records Spanish Guitar Vol. 1 and Spanish Guitar Vol. 2. As the album titles convey, this is all guitar.
Disc two finishes off the Spanish material, starting with the last three tracks off Spanish Guitar Vol. 2. It then moves on to Bream playing Bach and Dowland. CD three is roughly half the rest of the Dowland material, and finally The Art of Julian Bream, which has a more smorgasbord type selection of material.
I haven’t heard discs two or three yet. But, if they’re on a par with disc one, as I fully expect they will be, we’re in for a treat. I paid just under £18 for this three disc/five album collection. I generally try and spend less, in these straitened times. But this was easily well worth it.