Immediately after I heard of the death of Julian Bream last Friday morning, I wrote an obituary about him that appeared on The Wall Street Journal’s website later that day. Here’s an excerpt.

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It’s a safe bet that Julian Bream, who died on Friday at 87, would be remembered if he’d never done anything but play guitar. After Andrés Segovia, he was the best-known classical guitarist of the 20^th century, a player of limitless sensitivity who could hold an audience spellbound simply by plucking a few quiet notes on his unamplified instrument—but who also tossed off more technically demanding pieces with the panache of an old-time barnstorming virtuoso.

Yet Mr. Bream did much more than merely play guitar. He doubled on the lute, the guitar’s ancestor, and was responsible in large part for the postwar revival of interest in that long-forgotten instrument. He led his own ensemble, the Julian Bream Consort, one of the first period-instrument groups, and appeared frequently in recital with the tenor Peter Pears, a professional relationship that was immensely valuable to him. “I learnt a lot from Peter about phrasing like a singer, which is what we all try to do on instruments,” he told an interviewer in 2007.

Most important of all, Mr. Bream commissioned and gave the premieres of solo pieces and concertos for guitar by many of the leading composers of his time, among them Malcolm Arnold, Lennox Berkeley, Hans Werner Henze, Toru Takemitsu, Michael Tippett and William Walton. Unlike Segovia, who disliked all but the most conservative 20^th-century music, Mr. Bream did more than anyone else to modernize his instrument’s dusty repertoire….

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Read the whole thing here.

Mabel Mercer sings Cole Porter’s “Where, Oh Where” (from Out of This World) in an undated video clip of a live performance: 

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The greatest classical guitarist of the twentieth century died today. I reviewed one of his New York solo recitals for the Daily News back in the Nineties, and have never forgotten how wonderful it was. Here’s part of what I wrote.

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Julian Bream, who gave a recital Tuesday at Alice Tully Hall, made his professional debut a half-century ago. When he started out, guitar recitals consisted of fluff: second-rate Spanish pieces, miscellaneous arrangements and transcriptions, encore-type lollipops. Today, classical guitarists have a huge repertoire of challenging music on which to draw, much of it—including most of the best of it—either discovered or commissioned by Bream. No one since Andres Segovia has had so powerful an influence on guitar playing, and no one has played the guitar better.

Though Bream’s technique is no longer what it used to be, he remains a master interpreter, as well as an unsurpassed musical communicator. He offered a characteristic program Tuesday: suites by Bach and Visee, striking new works by Leo Brouwer and Toru Takemitsu (the first commissioned by Bream, the second dedicated to him), Isaac Albeniz’ ever-popular “Suite Espanola.” He chatted with the audience between pieces, introducing each one simply and memorably. And—most important—he played with a range of tone color and expressivity unrivaled by any other guitarist in the world….

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Julian Bream plays the closing “Passacaglia” from Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal, which he commissioned, premiered, and recorded:

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I write about William Friedkin’s 1970 screen version of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band. Here’s an excerpt.

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You can count on the fingers of one hand the Hollywood films based on important stage plays in which all the members of the cast of the original production reprised their roles on the big screen instead of being replaced by movie stars of varying wattage. Of them, the most artistically successful is “The Boys in the Band,” William Friedkin’s 1970 film version of Mart Crowley’s hit play about a group of unhappy gay Manhattanites who get together for a birthday party and spend the second half of the evening hacking away at each other’s emotional scabs. 

Widely regarded as shocking when it opened off Broadway in 1968, “The Boys in the Band” later became controversial in a different way because it portrayed its gay characters as bitter and self-hating, a stance that appalled younger men not old enough to remember the tightly closeted world portrayed with unflinching candor by Crowley. Today it is regarded as a kind of time capsule, a gay history play that shows how things were in the bad old days—but it’s also increasingly seen as a first-rate piece of dramatic work in its own right, and Mr. Friedkin’s adaptation conveys with singular brilliance the way “The Boys in the Band” plays on stage….

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Read the whole thing here.

The original theatrical trailer for The Boys in the Band:

Art Carney and Garson Kanin are interviewed on The Bill Boggs Show in 1979:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz.”

C.S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”