Review of British Guitar Music by Graham Anthony Devine, Naxos 2005

As justly the same interpreter writes in the booklet that accompanies this cd, British classic guitar world owes a lot to the great Julian Bream. Moved by the example of Segovia, Bream has represented in the second half of  the '900 a point of reference, an example and a stimulus for the English composers to produce new music for the classical six ropes instrument.
The cd begins with the 'Five Bagatelles' composed by William Walton (1902 -1983), dedicated to Malcom Arnold and performed the first time in 1972 by the same Bream. Peter Maxwell Davis (1934) has composed instead 'Farewell to Stromness', originally thought for piano and here arranged by Timothy Walker, it is a melody that recalls Scottish themes for bagpipe and violin, typical of their traditions.
 'Elegy' by Alan Rawsthorne (1905 -1971) had been incomplete to the death of the composer and was completed by Bream. The 'Sonatina Op. 52' by Lennox Berkeley (1903 -1989) was composed in 1957 and had always been played in the same year by Bream. It deals with a composition in the traditional sonata form and it recalls the British folk and the French impressionism, perhaps a heritage of his studies with Nadia Boulanger.
Always from Berkeley the 'Theme and Variations for Guitar' written in 1970 for Angelo Gilardino and interpreted in the following year by the same Gilardino. His 'Quatre Pieces pour the Guitare' go up again to the period when Berkeley studied in Paris with the Boulanger, between 1937 and 1932 and devoted to Segovia. Curiously Segovia has never performed these passages, found among his papers in the 2001.
'Five Impromptus' by Richard Rodney Bennet (1936), eclectic and versatile composer, close this nice record.
The Naxos confirms the constant attention that from several years dedicates to the classical guitar, a good cd with a predominantly melodic character that can be a nice soluction for many guitarists to widen their repertoire.