Sixty years ago, on Friday 12 June 1964, Julian Bream premièred the Nocturnal after John Dowland for Guitar, Op. 70 by Benjamin Britten at the seventeenth Aldeburgh Festival in the Jubilee Hall, in the seaside town of Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast.

This DOREMI release includes Julian Bream’s BBC Studio recording of Britten’s Nocturnal from October 1964. His RCA Victor recording of the Nocturnal on 20th Century Guitar was not released until 1967.

Benjamin Britten completed the Nocturnal after John Dowland for Guitar, Op. 70, which was dedicated to Julian Bream, in November 1963, before Britten’s 50th birthday on 22 November 1963. 

The repertoire which Bream chose to accompany this important and technically difficult première was not easy – that was never his approach! Instead, Julian Bream included another mammoth work on the programme – the Bach Chaconne. 

The year 1964 was particularly special for Julian Bream: the Julian Bream Consort won a Grammy Award for An Evening of Elizabethan Music in the category of ‘Best Chamber Music Performance’; and Julian Bream was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to music. The Queen’s Birthday Honours List was announced on 13 June 1964 – one days after the première Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal.

One of the best biographical works on Julian Bream’s life is the film Julian Bream: My Life in Music, directed by Paul Balmer (Music on Earth Productions), which was awarded GRAMOPHONE DVD of the year in 2007.

When Paul Balmer was making Julian Bream: My Life in Music, he suggested to Julian Bream that they include a visit to Aldeburgh in the film; this opened up a unique  opportunity for us all to revisit that historic première of June 1964.

Julian Bream with Paul Balmer at Snape Maltings. Photo ©Brendan McCormack

 In a recent interview with Paul Balmer, he explained to me that:

Julian loved my idea of returning to Aldeburgh. The setting seemed obvious once we decided the film should ‘top and tail’ with Bream’s proudest achievement – the composition by Britten of Nocturnal. I visited The Red House and was surprised to find the first draft of Nocturnal in their library. I surmised that Julian had not seen the draft and so I set up the sequence in the ‘special features’ where, sitting at Britten’s desk, he comes face to face, for the first time, with the ‘impossible intervals’. It is a real ‘moment’ not a ‘set up for film’.

Not only is the film Julian Bream: My Life in Music remarkable with contributions from John Williams, Peter Pears, Igor Stravinsky, William Walton, George Malcolm, Richard Rodney Bennett and the Julian Bream Consort, but there is also the bonus of having full video recordings of Bream playing repertoire such as Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal, Op. 70 and Manuel de Falla’s Homenaje, which Paul Balmer filmed at Snape Maltings in Aldeburgh.

For more details, my article on Julian Bream’s première of Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal, see Gendai Guitar, February 2024.

Paul Balmer is always busy with guitar-related and music-related projects, for more details on his past films and publications, and on his new series of videos called ‘GuitarStory’, see Music on Earth, http://www.musiconearth.co.uk/.

© Thérèse Wassily Saba 2024