Riffing on a Master

[peekaboo]

This year, the New York Guitar Festival honors the legacy of classical guitarist Julian Bream with an impressive lineup of virtual performances

The Newman and Oltman Duo: Michael Newman and Laura Oltman

Photo: Newman and Oltman Duo

 

The New York Guitar Festival, presented biennially since 1999, has avoided stylistic pigeonholing by shifting its focus with each installment: a classical guitar potpourri might be followed by a festival built around the music of Bruce Springsteen, an influential bluesman like the Rev. Gary Davis or a Gospel-rocker like Sister Rosetta Tharpe. And within an announced theme, the variety of players and interpretive approaches is typically broad, thanks no doubt to the eclectic tastes of the festival’s founders, David Spelman, a classical guitarist turned entrepreneur, and John Schaefer, the host of several influential new-music programs on WNYC. 

This year’s edition was nearly doomed by the pandemic, but Mr. Spelman had his heart set on a tribute to Julian Bream, the British virtuoso who died in August, at age 87. His solution was to invite 18 guitarists and three lutenists to submit video performances, and to post three clips daily between July 14 and 20 on the festival’s YouTube page. They can be viewed there indefinitely, along with recordings from past festivals. 

“Remembering Julian Bream” has a starry roster that includes Eliot Fisk, Sharon Isbin, Pepe Romero, David Leisner, Paul O’Dette, Hopkinson Smith, Jason Vieaux and several promising younger players performing music associated with Bream. But the festival’s heart is a half-dozen commissioned works, all by guitarists who also compose.

Julian Bream

Photo: David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images

Most listeners still think of Andrés Segovia as the architect of the modern classical guitar world, and there is no denying that Segovia reconfigured attitudes about the instrument. But Bream’s contributions were far more significant. Where Segovia’s interpretive style was self-consciously Romantic, Bream’s readings were streamlined and modern, yet sacrificed nothing in warmth or emotional weight. He also had an early place in the period instrument world, having revived the Renaissance lute and its repertory. And most crucially, where Segovia was content with works by composers who were barely known outside the guitar world, Bream commissioned music from composers with international reputations, among them Benjamin Britten, William Walton, Michael Tippett, Hans Werner Henze, Toru Takemitsu and dozens more, many of which have become centerpieces of the guitar’s repertory. 

Oddly, only two of the festival’s 21 players addressed those pieces. Benjamin Verdery offered a haunting account of Britten’s “Nocturnal,” a 1963 set of variations on a Dowland song (“Come, Heavy Sleep”), and William Kanengiser gave a vividly characterized performance of Richard Rodney Bennett’s moody, mildly angular Impromptus.

Of the festival’s commissions, Leo Brouwer’s “Through the Looking Glass (After Lewis Carroll ),” for two guitars, is of particular interest, given that Bream played Brouwer’s music. Performed by the Newman and Oltman Duo ( Michael Newman and Laura Oltman ), this graceful duet is less about dialogue than counterpoint: Instead of a give and take, the second guitar line elaborates on the first until an interlocking, gently mechanistic structure emerges. 

The Brouwer is less harmonically acidic than many of his earlier guitar works; in fact, few of the festival’s premieres have the complexity and grit Bream favored in new music. The composer who comes closest is Derek Gripper, whose “Blue Light” is dark and moody, with an angularity that would have pleased Bream, as would the score’s quotations from Britten’s “Nocturnal.” A central structural element of “Blue Light” is a descending bass line lifted straight from the Britten, and toward the end of the piece, Mr. Gripper quotes Britten’s rendering of the Dowland melody. 

Most of the new pieces were disarmingly simple, at least in harmonic terms. Laura Snowden, a young British-French guitarist who studied with Bream in his final years, built “Home” around a placid, wistful, folk-like theme, with muted tones struck softly between each note of the melody. Jozef Van Wissem, a lutenist who plays only new music (mostly his own), uses similar elements—a simple tune punctuated with repeating tones—in “Fancy a Nose Cap,” a short set of idiosyncratic variations that seems more like a sketch for a larger work than a fully executed idea. 

Gyan Riley’s “Sparkling Pines” is a study in contrasts, built of ringing tones, a memorable song-like lilt, and repeating figuration that has an etude-like quality at times. The simplicity of its opening section is deceptive: Mr. Riley transforms the work into a brisk, ornate and sometimes dramatic structure before the attractive opening theme returns. Like Mr. Gripper’s score, it rewards repeated listening. 

“Moonou” (“Octopus,” in Korean), by the Korean guitarist Jiji (Jiyeon Kim) mixes live and recorded guitar sounds with electronic timbres. Bream never recorded a work with an electronic component, but what he might have liked about this one is that however dense the electronics become, the guitar’s gentle, rounded tone always emerges from within it with a triumphant clarity. 

That most of these new works are unlike any in Bream’s repertory should not matter. Styles have changed since he made his last recording, in the mid-1990s. Whatever his own tastes, it was crucial to him that guitarists keep their repertory current.