Tombeau for Julian Bream by Brian Wright

Stathis Skandalidis plays Tombeau for Julian Bream by Brian Wright The practice of commemorating a lute player with a personalised tombeau is well established in the lute repertory. Amongst the many extant tributes are the two masterpieces by Sylvius Leopold Weiss, for Losy and for Hartig, as well as some splendid examples by Robert de Visée for several of the luthistes. This tradition, instigated perhaps by Ennemond Gautier in his Tombeau de Mézangeau, has served as a template for many lute composers to pay tribute to the passing of a major practitioner of their art such as Julian Bream (1933-2020). Quintessentially, the tombeau is an instrumental tradition and its abstract form differentiates it from, for example, the setting by Heinrich Isaac of Angelo Poliziano’s text Quis dabit capiti meo aquam, commemorating the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Moreover, in reviving the tombeau during the second decade of the twentieth century, Maurice Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin captures the spirit of Ennemond Gautier et al and presents it to a new and wider audience. Julian Bream’s admiration for the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt (1910-53) was well known, and the influence of these two guitarists on Brian Wright was the stimulus for the present tombeau which includes fragments of Reinhardt’s most famous work, Nuages. Wilfred Foxe, Durham, September 2020