Julian Bream at the BBC Chamber Music at the BBC

Julian Bream is the ultimate guitar hero.

Technically brilliant,

there's an astounding sensitivity to his playing.

A virtuoso and a showman, in his 50-year career, Bream pioneered

the place of the classical guitar in British musical life.

In this programme, we'll see and hear three decades of great

guitar and lute performances from the BBC archives.

From the intimacy of Bach...

..to the energy of William Walden.

We'll explore his routes in the hot jazz of Django Reinhardt.

And discover how we revived the long-forgotten

Elizabethan lute repertoire.

There are duets with his great friend, John Williams.

And through the magic of television, he even duets with himself.

Good looking, with sparkling eyes and the curl of a smile never

far from his lips,

Julian Bream has always been a hugely popular

figure, the antithesis of the high-brow, remote classical artist.

In 1962, the seminal arts programme Monitor followed him on tour.

GUITAR

APPLAUSE

The most important thing,

and certainly the most satisfying thing about playing the guitar, as

far as I'm concerned, is the intimate contact ones has with the strings.

Not just with the left hand but with the right hand.

And because of this intimate contact with the strings,

one has at one's disposal the most wonderful varieties of colour.

You can get piquant shades, you see, like this.

Or you can get the normal tone colour of the guitar.

Or a harp-like, velvet quality.

And if you really want the effect, you can

make a pizzicato sound like this.

-What about a Bach prelude?

-Bach prelude? All right. Bach.

APPLAUSE AND CHATTERING

'Julian Bream is London-born and London-bred.

'He comes from Battersea and he lives in Kensington.

'His friends are artists, sculptors, businessmen and barmaids.

'He's meeting people all the time on his job, and the job takes him

'all over the world, Darlington one week and Rome the next.'

Well, cheers, everybody, and the best of luck.

'And if he's not meeting his friends here, in the Fulham Road,

'then as likely as not, it will be at his own flat.

'It's a kind of regular thing, Julian Bream's on a Saturday night.'

'This is where it all began for Julian Bream,

'with the music of Django Reinhardt, the gypsy guitarist who made

'the Hot Club of France so famous in the '30 and '40s.

'This was the kind of music that Julian Bream grew up with.'

GUESTS APPLAUD AND CHEER

Don't worry, Patch. We're cut.

'The piano was the first instrument the Bream learned as a boy.

'By the time he was 11, he was taking lessons on Saturday mornings

'at the Royal College of Music.'

After my lessons, I used to pop onto a bus,

toddle across Battersea Bridge, and visit my grandma at her pub.

JAZZY PIANO

This is all that's left of my grandma's pub,

and up against that wall was the old piano,

and it was on this piano I used to play on a Saturday night,

and, well, I used to sometimes make five bob, if I was lucky.

They used to have a whip round with a cap.

Well, in those days, it was very good money.

When I first began to play the guitar,

it was not the classical guitar but the jazz guitar.

JAZZ MELODY

I had already given my Wigmore Hall debut in '51,

and my career was really getting under way, but, unfortunately,

I was called up for my national service in 1952.

COMMANDER SHOUTS

As the Korean War was on, I was on draft, for Korea, in fact,

and I really didn't fancy taking lutes and guitars out to that

sort of climate, apart from the fact that they may have got blown up too.

So, I had to find another posting,

and I was accepted into the Royal Artillery Band at Woolwich

on the basis of a three-year engagement with the colours.

It's amazing that I was accepted at all,

because what could the guitar do in a military band?

I couldn't go on a march playing the guitar.

So I quickly got myself an amplifier

and I drew a guitar from the stores, if you can believe it!

And put a magnet underneath the strings and away I went.

And about once a week, mostly in the winter time,

I would be playing in a dance band.

I had an extraordinary career in the army, because as soon as I got

posted to Woolwich, I promptly got myself a flat in Kensington.

I found that if I paid somebody to look after my bed space

in the barracks, I could live at my flat in Kensington

and drive down every morning, be on parade by nine o'clock,

and it would appear that I was just an ordinary regular soldier.

And on my leave, I used to travel abroad.

And I did concerts, which was totally illegal.

Bream's background of Battersea and jazz,

his concert work as a guitarist and his terrific vitality,

have taken him to the 16th century and the forgotten world of the lute,

an instrument that's been out of the public mind for over 300 years.

This particular lute has 14 strings

and is a copy of an instrument dated 1585.

HE TUNES LUTE

Shall we know go on to the last movement?

-Well, how was that?

-I thought that was a bit quick, George.

-What do you think?

-Oh, I don't know. Not for general purposes.

When you go into a concert, for example,

have you got all your colours worked out beforehand?

No, I never work out the colouring or the registration in my pieces

before I go onto the platform.

I leave that absolutely spontaneously until the performance.

-So that no two performances are ever exactly the same?

-Never.

Well, at least I hope they're not.

You've got to, if you like, be a little bit reckless.

In the early '50s, when he went to the Royal College Of Music,

Julian Bream wasn't allowed to study the guitar.

"Don't bring that instrument into this building,"

the director told him.

By 1963, the instrument had gained a measure of respectability.

Here's Bream with the English composer Malcolm Arnold

discussing how they came to collaborate on a guitar concerto.

The anchorman is Richard Attenborough.

Malcolm, tell me, it seems to me, knowing very little about it -

but it's a unique occasion having a composer and soloist here -

this is a very quiet instrument and therefore it seems to me

it would be very difficult to write a concerto for such an instrument.

Yes, it's difficult. It's very easy to drown the...the guitar.

I mean, the technical side of the guitar

is a difficult thing to understand.

It's a very subtle instrument.

But the reason I wrote for the guitar anyway,

for Julian in particular, is that I admire him,

I should think, almost more than any other musician living,

-to put it mildly.

-Yeah.

-But I didn't like him to know.

He's quite conceited enough as it is.

So don't tell him, for goodness' sake!

WIND INSTRUMENTS JOIN IN

STRINGS JOIN IN

Bream was a great virtuoso, no doubt about that.

He was also a showman, a brilliant entertainer.

But he was a musical pioneer as well.

His eponymous consort brought back to life the long-forgotten music

written for the lute, and his work performing Elizabethan music

paved the way for a full-scale early music revival in the 1970s and '80s.

A dance arrangement for full consort

of John Dowland's famous well-known song,

Can She Excuse My Wrongs,

which was sometimes called, in the instrumental version,

The Earl Of Essex Galliard.

Well, it's tremendous when you think that this music

was written between 1580 and 1615, just 35 years.

And of course this is really the reason why I'm so stimulated,

because I feel that one should resuscitate

the sort of deadness of our musical life - I think deadness.

APPLAUSE

When two great musicians decide to make music together,

the result can only be extraordinary and unique.

Well, this evening we have the privilege to receive

as our guests, two of the most celebrated classical guitarists.

Ladies and gentlemen, Julian Bream and John Williams.

APPLAUSE

APPLAUSE

More from that extraordinary partnership of Julian Bream

and John Williams later on in the programme.

It seems, in the '70s,

as if Bream was never really off the nation's TV screens.

Julian Bream left London in the mid-1960s to move to Semley,

a pretty village on the Wiltshire-Dorset border,

near the town of Shaftesbury.

A decade after he'd moved, the BBC followed him to the country.

Perhaps I ought to try a taste.

The truth of the matter is, Bream has a secret ambition.

He is acknowledged everywhere as a great guitarist -

that is indisputable.

Very nice.

But is the world is ready to recognise his talents

on the cricket field?

The opponents declare, having knocked up a formidable score.

But here comes Bream

and everyone is confident he can play a captain's innings.

Last man in and everything depends on him.

36 runs scored, 75 needed to win.

Oh, dear, oh, dear. This is a sad day for English cricket.

There's no reason why an international virtuoso

shouldn't live in the country,

provided he plans his touring very carefully.

In fact, I plan my tours around the pruning

and, indeed, the fresh vegetables.

Terrific!

I think there is something fascinating about plucked sound.

The plucked instruments, most of them - if not all - come from the East.

And perhaps it's to do with Eastern mysticism

and religious experience,

but plucked sound has a remarkable quality...

..because the actual pluck itself is the apex of the sound,

and thereafter it dies.

And if you are playing, say, a phrase of six or seven notes,

you're dealing, really, with six or seven births

and six or seven deaths.

We hate death and we don't know how to deal with it,

so, in fact, we sustain our lives as long as possible.

Come on, bowl me one of those googlies!

One solid clunk on those hands

could put an end to his career for good.

Naturally, it's a terrific risk, but I feel that I must live,

I must do things with my hands.

After all, my hands must be strong, particularly my left hand.

In a sense I don't want to cosset them too much,

because I think one can upset a certain equilibrium

and cause accidents.

I don't really bother with insurance

because I like to think, in some sense, I'm a practical person.

I believe that, to some extent, one is in the lap of the gods.

The relationship of the lute to the other instruments is very

interesting. It never has the tune, but it has so much of the texture.

Also, it gives so much of the pace.

Believe it or not, all the divisions

and fast-running passages in my lute part are all written down.

Many people think I make them up, but these Elizabethan players

must have been every bit as good as myself, possibly a bit better.

Not a bad performance at all.

It's such a wonderful sound, isn't it - I'm afraid to say so -

when the lute comes in?

Cut!

Thanks to 1970s television magic, Julian Bream was able to

partner himself in a duet for two lutes by John Dowland.

Another visitor to the country was his old friend John Williams.

As John Williams once recalled,

"Although the way we each play is as alike as chalk and cheese,

"we're not two musicians,

"we're an ensemble and we create magic together."

Bream's relationship with John Williams grew ever closer.

There were recitals, international tours,

they made an album called, quite simply, Together.

Here they are together again in the glorious chapel

of Wardour Castle, near Bream's country residence.

APPLAUSE

A composer who wrote for Julian Bream was William Walton.

Bream commissioned him to write a set of bagatelles.

Not that the process was entirely straightforward,

as the guitarist explained to Barry Norman on the BBC's Omnibus.

I commissioned these pieces and William, of course,

-takes a long time. You know...

-I was going to ask about that.

He's famous for, you know...

getting up in the morning and writing three notes and then going

back in the afternoon and rubbing one of them out, you know.

But I think he had great difficulty trying to start these pieces,

but once he got into it, I think it all flowed pretty quickly for him,

and what is interesting is that the writing is absolutely

marvellous for the instrument.

As we reach the end of this rich collection of Julian Bream's

appearances at the BBC, let's see him on the biggest stage

the Corporation can provide, the stage of the Royal Albert Hall.

Here he is at the BBC Proms in 1991 playing that guitar concerto

that Malcolm Arnold wrote for him in the 1950s.

The first movement of Malcolm Arnold's guitar concerto.

Julian Bream playing at the BBC Proms in 1991.

He retired from concerts in 2002.

"I felt I'd done enough," he said at the time.

"After all, I've been on stage for 55 years."

His legacy is absolutely clear.

He brought the lute back to life

after it had practically disappeared for two centuries.

And he turned the guitar into a real force in our concert life.

We'll finish with Julian Bream playing in glorious shadow,

a recording from the early '60s,

as he plays music by his Brazilian hero, Villa-Lobos.