Radio: Concerto In Each Corner

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30956, 12 January 1966, Page 8

Radio: Concerto In Each Corner

As a . senior American composer Elliot Carter has played an influential if largely unpublicised role in shaping the pattern of American music today.

One of his interesting recent works, the Double Concerto of 1961, will be broadcast from 3YC on Thursday, but it is not really a work suitable for steam radio. It is a concerto for harpsichord and piano with two separate chamber orchestras and the spatial separation of a stereo record or multiplex broadcast would provide better listening conditions. The harpsichord leads an ensemble containing flute, horn, trumpet, trombone, viola, double bass and percussion battery, while the piano leads a different ensemble of about the same size consisting of oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, cello and a percussion group with a heavier sonority. If there is a sense in which Carter is a composer's composer it is in his allocation of different musical material to the two groups. The harpsichord group concentrates on minor seconds, minor thirds, perfect and augmented fourths, minor sixths, minor sevenths and minor ninths, while the piano group emphasises major seconds, major thirds, perfect fifths, major sixths, major sevenths and major ninths. There are also all sorts of other differences—in rhythm, tempo and dynamics—which make it a complex maze for performers to work through. BLOWING DUST OFF Julian Bream’s speciality as an English lutenist might suggest a staid person, but everyone with preconceptions of what an English classical musician should be like has been surprised. Bream is 32, short and stocky, and has been described as having the appearance and manner of a ruffian, and, because he comes from

Battersea, sometimes the speech of one. He is Britain’s leading guitarist and driving force behind the Julian Bream Consort which will be heard from CHTV3 on Thursday evening (just before the Carter concerto from 3YC) in a programme of Elizabethan music. Bream sees Elizabethan music as primarily dance music. “When I play I try to give the rhythms the zest the old boys would have,” he says. “I may be off, and if old Thomas Morley came back he might well say, ‘Look here, Bream, it’s a bit quick and a bit slick,’ but that’s the way I see it.

“This is a great age for bookwormery. Not that I don’t have respect for the musicological boys, but I’m a performer and it’s my job to blow the dust off these things. When you play, damn the scholarship! You’ve got to make the stuff sound alive!” There are five others in this dance band—Desmond Dupre (lute and cittern), Joy Hall (bass violin), David Sandeman (flute), Robert Spencer (pandora and lute) and Olive Zorian (violin). The son of a jazz guitarist. Bream describes himself as uneducated. He started the guitar when he was 10 and had two lessons with Segovia when he was 14. At 15 he received formal musical training at the Royal College of Music. When he was 17, Thomas Goff, the harpsichord maker, offered to make him a lute. They found a sixteenth-cen-tury lute in the Victoria and Albert Museum and had it X-rayed to work out the complicated struts and ribs inside so that a copy could be made. Today he has dozens of lutes. Besides playing all that old lute stuff. Bream plays guitar works by modern composers such as Arnold, Rodrigo and Britten, some of them written for him, and his interest extends to such instruments as the Indian sitar and sarod.