Julian Bream’s (1933–2020) guitar transcriptions belong to that historical juncture when, from the end of the nineteenth into the early twentieth century, the guitar ceased to be confined to the salon and bourgeois sociability and began to claim a place on the major concert platform. For an instrument hungry for recognition, it was essential not only to secure new works from leading contemporaries but, above all, to outgrow its practical constraints: playing music conceived for more prestigious instruments such as violin, cello or piano served both as a test of mettle and as a bid for parity. The prize was a place among the principal concert instruments.
Those who drove the guitar’s modern ascent were also deft transcribers. Such were the Spaniards Francisco Tárrega, Miguel Llobet and, ultimately, Andrés Segovia, to whom received opinion attributes the instrument’s revival. In the later twentieth century several guitarists extended the canon beyond the Segovian paradigm, and Bream stands prominently among them.
Although he never disowned the repertoire championed by Segovia, centred on Impressionism and on a largely Spanish Romanticism, Bream is widely regarded as the standard-bearer for a generation of composers far removed from Iberian and neoclassical idioms. Berkeley, Britten, Maxwell Davies and Walton are the best-known names associated with his commissions and performances. Alongside this, Bream left a formidable body of transcriptions spanning the Renaissance and Baroque through to the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century.
The modern guitar readily assimilates the lute and cognate repertories as notated in tablature from the Renaissance well into the eighteenth century. More extensive adaptation is required with instruments such as the baroque lute, whose tuning differs from the modern guitar’s and whose compass lies markedly deeper in the bass.
The Tombeau that the German composer-lutenist Sylvius Leopold Weiss (1687–1750) wrote on the death of the Bohemian count and lutenist Jan Antonín Losy (Logy) betrays, in its fluent mutability, an improvisatory, toccata-like provenance bound up with the instrument’s tuning. Bream must forgo the baroque lute’s basses and the resonant, cushioned bloom that its tuning affords; the guitar version, inevitably leaner, nonetheless preserves the work’s original momentum and, if anything, brings its lyric impulse into clearer focus.
Most of the Bream transcriptions on this album, however, derive from keyboard originals. The harpsichord and the piano have exerted a powerful fascination on guitarists for centuries, and Bream was no exception. Certain polyphonic textures lend themselves naturally to transfer, and the originals at times contain figures whose physical gesture is all but guitaristic.
Hence the long tradition of adapting Domenico Scarlatti’s (1685–1757) sonatas for harpsichord for the guitar—so much so that performers often receive them almost as if they were original pieces. Segovia was quick to sense the guitar’s potential within this vast corpus. Bream not only performed some of Segovia’s Scarlatti arrangements; he also produced his own, as with the Sonata K87 heard here. Its design is in two repeated halves, shaped by a measured, austere lyricism. Bream moves the key from B minor to E minor, minimising losses in the polyphony and exploiting the guitar’s resonance to the full; the result glows with a beauty at once plaintive and luminous.
E minor—so favoured by the guitar for its plaintive, elegiac colouring—is likewise Bream’s choice for Lied ohne Worte, op. 19 no. 6 by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–1847). Its evocative designation, Venetianisches Gondellied (Venetian barcarolle), had already drawn the attention of Francisco Tárrega, who made his own version. It is reasonable to suppose that Bream began from that precedent, pruning decorations that might impede the rocking cantabile lines of this delicate romance. What lends the arrangement its distinctive timbre is Bream’s use of harmonics, which reach into the upper register with an ethereal emission akin to a spun bel canto line.
By contrast, Bream’s transcriptions from Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909) and Enrique Granados (1867–1916) are rooted in a more earthbound physicality. These are piano pieces already shot through with gestures that nod towards the guitar and other plucked instruments. Tárrega, Llobet and Segovia grasped this affinity and, with their adaptations from Albéniz, Granados and Malats, helped crystallise the archetypal bond between the guitar and Spain. Bream’s reimaginings are no less compelling.
«Nel silenzio della notte, che interrompe il sussurro delle brezze rese profumate dai gelsomini, le guzlas suonano accompagnando le serenate e diffondendo nell’aria melodie ardenti e note dolci come l’ondeggiare delle palme nell’alto dei cieli». The epigraph Albéniz places above Córdoba, the last of the four Cantos de España, op. 232, ushers us into a swiftly alternating sequence of scenes: tolling funeral bells, singers of expansive theatrical gesture, and players of plucked instruments punctuating the moment with irreverent rasgueos. The sensual, allusive Spain of Córdoba finds in the guitar—more readily than in the piano—its most authentic voice. Bream deploys every resource, from harmonics to reiterated tremolo, to sustain the work’s gestural charge and to recast it on the guitar with renewed pictorial vigour. Much the same holds for Cataluña from the Suite Española, op. 47 no. 2: here Bream resorts to scordatura on the two lowest strings to preserve the colour of the original key (G minor) and to heighten its languid, insinuating expressivity.
Enrique Granados’s Valses poéticos, far less voluptuous in character, seem to echo the alternating male and female personae of the zarzuela—works of the musical stage that played a major role in shaping Spanish musical identity. Conceived as a tight-knit cycle, the Valses weave recurrent motifs throughout and even bring back the opening waltz at the close. Bream extracts the second and the seventh numbers; the outcome is an exuberant tour de force that scarcely leaves one missing the piano’s sonorities.
So too with Bream’s transcription of Melodie ludowe (Folk Melodies), a piano cycle by the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski (1913–1994). This is the first complete guitar transcription of the set, in which Lutosławski reworks twelve Polish folk tunes for pedagogical use. A piquant harmonic palette—polytonal inflections, chromatic spice—and sharply etched metres keep the ear alert. Acknowledging the piano’s superior resources, Bream chooses, with seasoned craft, to shift registers and keys where needed and to thin the polyphony with discretion.
If, as the old adage has it, translation entails a measure of betrayal, then a certain latitude may be the price of preserving the music’s original spark. The success of Bream’s results amply vindicates his relaxed stance towards authorship. Thus the guitar’s literature has been able to absorb a composer like Lutosławski, who otherwise stands outside the idiom of six strings; the same may be said of Bream’s transcriptions from another composer beyond the guitar’s orbit, Béla Bartók (1881–1945).
The Petite Suite presented here—never recorded by Bream—is a succinct anthology drawn from the 44 Duos for Two Violins. The transcriber’s aim is to juxtapose movements in an order not envisaged by Bartók so as to trace an expressive arch that begins in rarefaction, quickens, and returns to stillness. Written for a register far higher than the guitar’s, the original duo texture obliges Bream to reinforce the lower range, whether by his own invention or by taking cues from Bartók’s self-arrangements. Notably, the suite’s final movement also appears in the piano cycle For Children; the first, third and fifth movements likewise occur in the piano Petite Suite that Bartók fashioned from the 44 Duos.
As at the date of this booklet, the Bream transcriptions presented here remain unpublished. They were studied directly at the Jerwood Library of the Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London, to which Bream donated his scores. Through patient archival work these versions—legendary through Bream’s recordings yet still inaccessible to the wider public—are brought back into circulation, restoring an important chapter in twentieth-century guitar playing. In so doing, we revive not only works by great composers but also the contribution of a guitarist, Julian Bream, whose artistic legacy is still less widely recognised than it should be.
Leonardo De Marchi
Venice, 16 October 2025
Unoriginal – Julian Bream’s Unpublished Guitar Transcriptions
