(Photo by Grant Peterson/Fairfax Media via Getty Images)

The great master of the guitar and lute died at 87.
Thanks for everything Maestro Julian Bream.
R.I.P.

As a luthier, he was the detonator of my career.
As an amateur guitar player and also on the lute long time, he remains at the top of my most outstanding influences.

If I partly owe him the discovery of renaissance music on the lute (many thanks also to Rafik Samman), and particularly the Elizabethan repertoire, with John Dowland and other great composers of this period, it is the idea conveyed during my guitar studies of his particular lute, which was nicknamed here his lute-guitar, and which became my first lutherie project around 1977.

The testimonies in his memory will be innumerable, and by important figures who will have shared much closer and privileged moments than mine, and who will deserve to be taken into consideration.

I retain here a moment of his very particular career, which took place near here, in Canada in Toronto, and which was this unusual meeting of 2 musical greats, around the lute, between Bream and Stravinsky, the latter being in rehearsal for his -Symphony of Psalms-.
Maestro Bream explains during an interview the context of the meeting:

-Interview with Bream –
“I was on tour in Toronto with a camera team and was asked would I like to meet Stravinsky and play him something on the lute and I said” Of course! “But when I got there the poor chap was just about to conduct the Symphony of Psalms in a recording session; they rolled me on and it was obvious that this was just not what he wanted. He was obviously annoyed and I don’t blame him. I had total sympathy for him. But it was the most embarrassing moment of my career ”

Some details concerning the lutes used by Bream during his career. (Goff, Rubio and Breton)

http://www.julianbreamguitar.com/lutes.html

As a testimony and memory, I also enclosed 2 photos taken around 1980 of my 1st instrument made, a Renaissance lute with 9 courses.