Music: INSTRUMENTALISTS

The Phantom Troubadour

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 of his time in the placid surroundings of his country house in Wiltshire, about 75 miles from noisy London.

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 plinks, resonant harpsichord and piano tones, all serve not to decorate or distract but to clarify the structure of the music.

On the lute, a 14-string, potbellied cousin of the guitar whose more delicate strains went out of fashion two centuries ago, Bream has a special capacity to enliven the courtly archaisms of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. This is not only a matter of musicianship but of an instinctive sympathy for the older period’s flavor, style, and more restrained decibel level. He reads about the era voraciously, fancies that he might have felt right at home in it. “I strum one chord on the lute,” he says wistfully, “and I go back 400 years.”

Old Shoe. Yet there could be no better proof that modern music still has something to offer Bream,and he to it, than his latest RCA album, 20th Century Guitar. In compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos, Frank Martin, Hans Werner Henze and Reginald Brindle, he weaves nimbly through some fierce technical obstacles, catching the harshness of the contemporary idiom while losing none of the 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.

The expanded repertory represented by Bream’s new recording is certain to increase his popularity, which already is great enough to sell out auditoriums like Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall and London’s Wigmore Hall for guitar-lute recitals. Young people, especially, like his old-shoe manner-he slouches spread-legged in a chair, chatting and joking with the audience between selections-and look to him as a sort of troubadour of time-tested musical values. “The young love the clarity, order and logic of my music,” he says. “They are people who are looking not only forward but back.” People, in short, like Bream himself.