Saturday, August 15, 2020

Julian Bream 1933 -- 2020

From 1963, please enjoy the incomparable Julian Bream on lute and a meltingly beautiful performance of John Dowland's "Lachrimae Pavin."



The album that's from...


...which is essentially a Top of the Pops collection of hits from the early 1600s, remains one of my all-time favorite classical records. It does not seem to be on CD; I had it digitized from a vinyl copy a few years ago, and if you ask me nicely I'll burn you one. In any case, as you can hear from the above, the music therein is the kind of stuff The Beatles would have been doing had they been born 400 years earlier.

I should add that Bream himself turns out to have had a much more interesting biography than I'd ever imagined; I particularly like the fact that as a kid he had a dog he named after Django Reinhardt.

2 comments:

pete said...

largely self-taught, I hear

Mark said...

Since this was never released on CD, its original release was on RCA, and since Bream just passed, I predict this will appear on CD on the BMG label by the end of the month.

Ahem ... ahem ... and of course, digitally remastered.