Julian Bream, the British guitarist regarded as one of the finest exponents of the classical style, has died aged 87. The news was confirmed by his management company, who said he died “peacefully at home”. No cause of death was given. Bream was born in Battersea in 1933, the son of a father who played piano and jazz guitar – a self-built electric version – and taught Julian the rudiments of each instrument. Bream’s talent earned him a scholarship at the Royal College of Music, where he studied piano and cello. But he was largely self-taught on his primary instrument, the guitar. He played his first public guitar recital in Cheltenham in 1947, aged 13. That year his father chanced upon a sailor walking through London carrying a lute and asked what it was. The sailor sold it to him and Bream began learning it, eventually helping to revive wider interest in the instrument and Elizabethan music. He carried out national service between 1952 and 1955, putting his instruments in storage but playing electric guitar in an army dance band. “That’s when I learned the job of improvisation – a way of making music that is almost totally closed, these days, to the classical performer”, he later said. After leaving the army, he replaced Benjamin Britten as the accompanist to tenor Peter Pears’s performances of Elizabethan song, and in the early 1960s he formed the Julian Bream Consort to perform music of the era. Bream continued to play classical guitar, performing repertoire by composers including Joaquín Rodrigo and Heitor Villa-Lobos. Britten’s 1963 piece Nocturnal was written especially for him, featuring complex variations on the English Renaissance composer John Dowland’s Come, Heavy Sleep. Its success helped to cement the guitar in the classical tradition, and other composers including Malcolm Arnold, Michael Tippett, Hans Werner Henze and Peter Maxwell Davies would write for Bream. He continued an illustrious international touring and recording career for decades, including numerous duo recordings with another virtuoso guitarist, John Williams. He expressed an ongoing love for jazz guitar, describing Django Reinhardt as his hero and even naming his dog after him. He moved to Semley, Wiltshire, where he lived between 1966 and 2008. Bream was awarded an OBE in 1964 and a CBE in 1985; he won four Grammy awards from 20 nominations. He married his first wife Margaret Williamson in 1968. They divorced, and he married Isabel Sanchez in 1980. Interviewed in the Guardian aged 80, Bream, who retired in 2002, said he was no longer playing: “The thing I feel a little annoyed about is that I know I’m a better musician than I was at 70, but I can’t prove it.” • This article was updated with a correction: Bream’s father bought him his first lute, rather than Bream himself.