MUSIC REVIEWS : Guitarist Bream Quietly Triumphs

Great performing musicians often give the impression of toying with--of pawing almost--the music at hand, shaping even seemingly innocent details, melding phrases into conversation.

This guitarist Julian Bream accomplished Saturday night in a well-filled Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, doing so quietly, unassumingly and, most of all, pointedly. Never mind the whooping reception from the assembled Breamites, the music was to be the focus. Further, and underlining the essentially musical values of the concert, Bream’s program was a generally unflamboyant one--although others might have made plenty of show out of it--despite some very real technical hurdles within it.

Indeed, the concert began with two formidable challenges, the Prelude and Fugue from Bach’s Sonata, BWV 1001, and Paganini’s Sonata in A, both of which found the guitarist stiff in the opening pages.

As he continued, however, his playing became more fluent and flexible, more casual. He sped up--just for the fun of it?--a brief passage in the Fugue. He applied a glowing hue and vibrato to the Romanze movement of the Paganini and delivered its pyrotechnical finale with jauntiness, bounce and impressive finesse.

The 59-year-old British musician’s skills seemed wasted, however, upon the novelty on the program, Antonio Jose’s impressionistic (but drab) and repetitive Sonata (1933). They were put to much better use in the idiomatic transcriptions of orchestral works by Falla (from El amor brujo and El sombrero de tres picos), and of piano works by Granados (four Danzas espanolas) and Ravel (A la maniere de Borodine and Pavane pour une infante defunte).

He lavished a wondrous array of color, articulation and inflection upon these pieces, but never self-consciously--the changes were quick and easy, never underlined, and always meaningful to the musical discourse. One listened to Bream’s Pavane and heard Ravel’s orchestration in subtle miniature, without preciousness.