There are recordings that announce themselves as a curiosity and yet turn out to be something far more essential: not lost masterworks, but a missing page from the history of a great musician. The title Unoriginal is almost ironic in this regard: this music was not originally written for guitar, but Bream's art consisted precisely in finding a new identity for existing repertoire. That is exactly the paradox on which this release is based. Julian Bream (1933-2020), the English guitarist who spent decades trying to pull the instrument out of Segovia's shadow, left behind at his death in 2020 an extensive collection of transcriptions that he played and recorded, but never published. They lay waiting in the Jerwood Library of Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London, until young Florentine guitarist Giulio Cecchi delved into them and lets them be heard here for the first time in published score form.
This is immediately also the heart of the story this album tells. In the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the guitar had to carve out a place for itself among the great concert instruments, and it did so not only with newly composed works by contemporaries, but equally by appropriating music intended for violin, cello or, especially, piano. Whoever could master that repertoire proved that the instrument could do as much as the big boys. Tárrega, Llobet and Segovia did it first. Bream continued the line, but with a gaze that reached further than the Spanish-tinged aesthetics with which Segovia profiled the guitar internationally: alongside Britten, Walton and Berkeley he also programmed transcriptions of composers who had never had anything to do with the guitar.
This makes for a programme with a remarkably broad sweep. There is the Tombeau by Samuel Leopold Weiss (1687-1750), originally for baroque lute and thus transferred to an instrument that must lack the deep, pillowy soft basses of the lute – Cecchi does not compensate for this loss by forcing, but lets the improvisatory, almost toccata-like breathing of the piece simply take its course, and thereby gains in clarity what is lost in sonorous volume. There is the Sonata K87 by Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), transposed by Bream from E minor to B minor to preserve the polyphonic structure and playability on guitar, here played with a restrained, almost understated lustre. There is the Venetian gondola song by Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), in which Bream – building on an earlier Tárrega version – lets the overtones sing with an almost vocal thinness; Cecchi brings out that effect beautifully without overdoing it.
The Spanish section, with Córdoba and Cataluña by Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909) and the Valses Poéticos by Enrique Granados (1867-1916), is where the record comes closest to familiar territory, and also where Cecchi sounds most relaxed: the rasgueos, those typical fanning chord strokes from the Spanish guitar tradition, in Córdoba have something theatrical without becoming caricatural, and in Cataluña, where Bream retunes the lowest strings to preserve the original key, he manages to capture the somewhat melancholic, insinuating tone precisely. More interesting, because they lie further from home, are the two sections that form the heart of this record: Melodie ludowe by Witold Lutosławski (1913-1994), twelve Polish folk songs heard here for the first time in their entirety on guitar, and the Petite Suite by Béla Bartók (1881-1945), an idiosyncratic montage from the 44 Duos that Bream himself never recorded. The latter is immediately the most piquant part of the record: music that is deeply rooted in the playing world of the violin and that Bream had to translate into a totally different instrument, drawing partly on Bartók's own piano arrangements. Cecchi plays it with a precision that never hides the provenance – you continue to hear that this music comes from a violin world, and it is precisely this point of friction that makes it compelling.
That this discovery has not become merely a musicological project is due to Giulio Cecchi himself. He approaches this material not as museum pieces, but as living music, and nowhere does he give the impression of doing archival work: there is something impatient, something curious in his playing, as if he is just as surprised by what he discovers as the listener. His playing testifies to a deep understanding of the instrument's possibilities: he knows how to draw a broad palette of colours, nuances and emotions from the guitar and also makes small musical jewels of the shorter pieces. His technique is completely controlled and is entirely in the service of the music – virtuosity never becomes an end in itself – but more interesting is that he resists the temptation to smooth everything out: where the music calls for a certain austerity, as in the Weiss, he leaves that sober sound world intact rather than obscuring it with too much vibrato or resonance.
But it is precisely there that the weak point of this release comes to light: not in Cecchi's playing, but in the dramaturgy of the programme itself. The individual pieces are without exception interesting, often even beautiful, but as a whole the cd remains too much within the same colour spectrum. The majority of the chosen works appeal especially to the most inward-looking side of the guitar: musing, lyrical, hushed. This produces moments of great beauty, but over time a certain uniformity emerges. The guitar is not only an instrument of remembrance and contemplation; it can also be rhythmically sharp, exuberant, virtuosic and take on almost orchestral proportions. It is precisely these other facets that remain somewhat underlit here. A more carefully structured programmatic alternation would not only have given more breathing space to this remarkable discovery, but would also have conveyed more convincingly the versatility of Bream's transcription art.
A curious technical imperfection concerns the recording: at the transition to new tracks there is always an audible click or switching, as if a button is being pressed. It is not a major problem, but it is a noticeable imperfection that detracts from the otherwise careful presentation.
Is it an essential record? For anyone who knows something about the history of the guitar as a transcription instrument, this is without question an important release. Yet this cd transcends the level of a mere archival discovery: it lets us hear again how Julian Bream was not only a great guitarist, but also an artist who continuously pushed the boundaries of his instrument. Almost six years after his death, he can still add new material to his own legend – proof of how much he left behind and how much there apparently still remains to be discovered.