クラシックギターの巨匠、ジュリアン・ブリーム（Julian Bream）は９月にグラモフォン社（Gramophone）から２０１３年Lifetime Achievement Award（生涯功績賞）を受賞しました。
この賞の過去の受賞者はClaudio AbbadやAndré Previnなど著名な音楽家達です。
ジュリアン・ブリームは１９３３年７月１５日にロンドンで生まれ、ジャズギタリストを父に持つ音楽的環境の中で育ちました。幼少の時から小型のガット弦のスペイン・ギターをかき鳴らし、１１歳の誕生日に父からギターをもらい、１３歳でプロデビューのギターリサイタルを行い、神童と言われました。クラシックギターを弾く人で知らない人はいない、２０世紀の最も傑出したクラシック・ギタリストの一人です。
華々しい成功をおさめたジュリアン・ブリームですが、５５年間のプロとしての演奏活動の後、２００２年に引退しました。しかし、公式な引退後も実は自分の家の近所の教会やホールでは時折好んでリサイタルをしていたそうです。ただ、ここ何年間かは関節炎の痛みに悩まされての演奏だったとのこと。
この７月に８０歳になったブリームのこのインタビュー記事の中から自分にとって特に興味のある部分を下に抜粋します。
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・・・・ 「自分が７０歳の時よりも今の方がより優れた音楽家になっていると感じているのだが（ I know I'm a better musician than I was at 70）、それを証明する方法がないことが悩ましい。」 ・・・ 「自分の身体は弱くなっているかもしれないが、音楽の鑑識眼（critical faculties）はかつてよりもずっと鋭くなっている（more discriminating）。音楽のフレージング、テンポ、また、音楽一般の解釈において、過去１０年間で自分の鑑識眼はおおいに豊かになっている（much more critical）。」
・・・ ジュリアン・ブリームは今はギター演奏を全くしていないというのは正しくない。数十年にわたって続けてきた一日４時間以上の演奏練習に代えて、最近は彼は日々の練習をアルペジオ（arpeggios）とスケール（scales）に制限している。
・・・ 「私は自分の人生を音楽にささげた。それは、成功したいとか、お金を稼ぎたいからではなく、自分を表現し、人々を喜ばせたかったからだ。それが自分の信条だった。しかし、７０歳から８０歳までの過去１０年間の生活が一番楽しかった（the most interesting)、なぜなら自分がしたいことだけをしたからだ。今や自分にとって自分を解き放ち、やり残していることを楽しむ時になっている。」
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上述のように、ジュリアン・ブリームは７０歳を過ぎて更に音楽鑑識眼が鋭くなった、つまり、音楽性が高まったと述べています。もともと天才と言ってもよい巨匠が、これだけの高齢になっても更に音楽的に発展しているとは驚きです。私はまだ６０代ですから、これは自分にとって励みになる言葉です。ただ、これが巨匠のレベルの人だからこそのものではなく、私のような一般人にも当てはまるものだと信じたいとは思います。
また、彼は（肉体的故障と衰えから）今は曲の練習はしないが、日々、アルペジオ（和音の各音を早く連続して演奏）とスケール（音階）の練習だけはしているとの事。これは私が小原聖子先生から学んだことを裏付けます。２年ちょっと前から小原聖子先生のギターレッスンを受けるようになって、私は初めて基礎練習のやり方とその重要性を教わりました。そして、今は家で練習する時に、最初にスケールと和音を弾く基礎練習をしています。ブリームほどの巨匠でも、今でもスケールとアルペジオだけは弾いているという事は、その重要性を証拠づけるものだと私には思えます。
＜このインタビュー記事の原語全文を参考までに下に転載します。＞
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Julian
Bream: 'I'm a better musician now than when I was 70'
Next
week classical guitarist Julian Bream will receive the Gramophone lifetime
achievement award. He talks to Stuart Jeffries about success and learning to
let go
Two
years ago Julian Bream was walking
with his retriever, Django, in the fields around his Dorset home, when a
neighbour's dog knocked him to the ground, breaking both hips and injuring his
left hand. For several years, Britain's greatest virtuoso of guitar and lute
had played through the pain of arthritis, but these new injuries compelled him
to renounce making music seriously. He had retired in 2002 after 55 years of
professional performing, but still liked to give the occasional recital at
churches or halls near his home.
Thus
ended his longest affair, one that started when nine-year-old
Julian put on one of his dad's Quintette du Hot Club de France LPs
and was seduced by what he calls the "burning anguish" of Django
Reinhardt's playing.
How much are you playing these
days? "Not at all. There's nothing sad about not playing any
more," says Bream, who turned 80 in July. But in the next breath he adds:
"The thing I feel a little annoyed about is that I know I'm a
better musician than I was at 70, but I can't prove it."
Next
week, Bream will receive the prestigious lifetime achievement award at theGramophone awards (previous winners
include Claudio Abbado, Janet Baker, Alfred Brendel,
André Previn). And while he says the body may be weaker, he also suggests that
his critical faculties are more discriminating than ever. "I became much
more critical in the last decade, of phrasing and tempo and general
musical interpretation."
It's not quite true that Bream
has stopped playing, but these days, instead of the practice sessions
lasting more than four hours he maintained for decades, he restricts himself to
a few daily arpeggios or scales. "The whole idea is that I believe it's
very good for one's brain and muscular system to work in harmony. If you keep
up your playing it just keeps things ticking over."
We're sitting in Bream's living
room, and during our two hours together Bream only produces a guitar once – and
then only at the photographer's request. He painfully picks out
a few notes.
"I devoted my life to music
for a reason," he says, "and the reason wasn't because I wanted
to get on or make money, but to try to fulfil myself and also to
give people pleasure. That's been my credo."
That shouldn't suggest that
Bream is discontented with his lot. "The last 10 years of my life,
from 70 to 80, have been the most interesting because I have only
done what I wanted to do. I have cut away what I call the excess
stuff in my life. I'm quite reflective – I listen to music, I read, I walk
with Django."
In 2008,
he sold Broad Oak House, the sprawling Wiltshire
farmhouse he had lived in since 1966, with its 30 acres, stables, rose and
vegetables gardens, his collection of classic cars, and the acoustically
refined stone summer house where he would practise.
To show
me what that lavish, gregarious time of his life was like, Bream takes a DVD
from his new 43‑disc box set, The Julian Bream
Collection, which Sony is releasing this month to coincide with his
80th and the lifetime achievement award. This DVD is of his 1976 BBC
film, A
Life in the Country, made at Broad Oak House. There is footage
of him playing badminton in the garden with composer Hans Werner Henze,
trouncing his friend and fellow guitar virtuoso John Williams at table tennis,
and stringing up cricket nets so his team of arty friends could prepare to be
thrashed by the local village team.
Now that lavish lifestyle has
been pruned back. He lives in a little bungalow in Donhead St Andrew,
a few miles from his former home. The classic cars and most of
the guitars have gone. He no longer smokes, and he drinks so little
alcohol that he insists we leave with a bottle of German whisky a recent
interviewer brought as a gift; and lives alone but for his 11-and-half-year-old
black retriever.
From beneath the broad-brimmed
boater he wears even indoors Bream beams. "I've had a lovely life. I've
had a great life." He switches to third person. "You're
preparing yourself." By renouncing the world as Buddhists recommend?
"Letting go, yes, but in a controlled way."
Not quite a musical autodidact,
Bream picked up his first guitar chops playing along to dance bands on the
radio. His father, a commercial illustrator and jazz band guitarist,
bought him his first classical guitar when he was 11, and the pair set about
working through tutorial books.
Was he a
child prodigy? "Not really." Some might think otherwise. At 12, he
played at the London Philharmonic Society of Guitarists; the principal was
so impressed that he agreed to teach Bream and later arranged for him to
meet and play with Andrés Segovia, the great
Spanish virtuoso. At 13, he made his professional debut in Cheltenham.
At 15, he was already a seasoned recitalist and won a full scholarship
at London's Royal College of Music where he studied, not guitar (the
instrument, he maintains, was frowned upon), but piano and cello.
"I was mostly self-taught
on guitar and that had its benefits. It's a great thing to work through
problems on your own."
One day in 1947, his dad was
walking down Charing Cross Road and met a sailor carrying a lute. It would
become a key moment for British postwar music. "He asked: 'What is
that?' The sailor told him. 'How much?' 'Couple of quid it's yours.' " He
gave the instrument to Julian, who repaired and mastered it. Long before
Sting fingered his first lute and crooned his first Dowland, Bream was the
instrument's postwar pioneer.
The lute
chimed with the young Bream's intellectual interest in the history of Tudor
England. He shared his passion for Elizabethan music with the great tenor Peter
Pears, whom he met with the latter's lover and musical partner, Benjamin
Britten, in Aldeburgh in 1952. Bream replaced Britten as accompanist in Pears's
recitals of Elizabethan songs, and during the 50s they toured the world
and recorded together, often while
Britten remained in Suffolk composing.
By the
late 50s, and only in his early 20s, Bream had established himself as a
professional lutenist and guitarist, readily able to commission new
pieces from composers. In 1960, he established the Julian Bream Consort, a period-instrument
ensemble with Bream as lutenist helping to intensify the revival of
interest in music from the Elizabethan era.
But it
was Britten's Nocturnal after John Dowland (1963) for solo
guitar that made Bream's name and compelled sceptics to take the instrument
seriously in Britain. "The Nocturnal was very nearly
beyond me. I went to Robert Graves's house in Majorca and there, in the middle
of an olive grove, he had a shepherd's hut where I retreated for 10
days to practise the Nocturnal. It was such a responsibility –
to Ben, to myself, and to the guitar."
Britten's Nocturnal encouraged
many other eminent composers to write for Bream, helping effect a renaissance
in the guitar repertoire. In 1964, he was awarded the OBE for his services
to music. By then, he had won the first of four Grammy awards in the US.
In the 70s, 80s and 90s, he became one ofclassical music's bestselling and most prolific
recording artists.
Julian
Bream, photographed at his home in Dorset, September 2013. Photograph: Eamonn
Mccabe
Bream drives us back to the
railway station. We pass the railway bridge where he crashed in his
open-top MG in 1984, smashing bones in his right elbow and making him fear
he would never play again. Instead, he relearned how to play the
guitar and three months later did a US tour with "various nuts and
bolts" in his arm. "In those days, I had the discipline to come
back from the brink of – well, annihilation is putting it too
strongly – but of the end of my career. I refused to let go."
And now? "Now it's time to
let go, to enjoy what's left." He waves us off and drives back home
to his beloved Django.
• The
43-disc Julian Bream Collection is released this month
by Sony. He will be awarded the
Gramophone lifetime achievement award on 17 September. Details: gramophone.co.uk.
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