Bryn Terfel: Bad Boys, Royal Festival Hall, London
Monday 16 November 2009
Latest in Reviews
On Facebook
Arts & Ents blogs
Mario & Vidis: An album makes you rethink what you’ve been doing
In 2007 Marijus Adomaitis teamed up with Vidmantas Cepkauskas to form Mario & Vidis – Lithuania...
Beth Jeans Houghton interview: “I hate London”
Falling from the limelight is often damaging to any artist and devastating at the start of a career....
Turbo Records going into overdrive for 2012
Last year I interviewed Tiga, owner of Canadian label Turbo Records, about his ZZT project - which h...
Bryn Terfel arrived in the capital armed with countless sneers and as many ways to make mischief. His latest album, Bad Boys – a comprehensive gallery of operatic rogues and villains – was now a tour, and there was a big, glossy, souvenir programme to prove it.
But at least this latest participant in the South Bank's International Voices series offered value for money – the big Welshman doesn't short-change us, not even when he's in the guise of that prize quack Dr. Dulcamara whose lotions and potions are cheap for a reason.
It was as Dulcamara (he of Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore) that Terfel – his features already fixed in a suitable expression of contempt – arrived on stage to join his touring band, Sinfonia Cymru, a lively youth orchestra culled from outstanding student talent who, under conductor Gareth Jones, provided the evening's accompaniments and between-number "groutings", like the Ballet Music from Gounod's Faust and Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre (with a mean violin solo from Cerys Jones).
The odd prop or costume accessory distinguished between the evening's incorrigible baddies, but it was the engaging Terfel, as himself, who made the introductions. That's the thing about this man: he's a big international star with the common touch; a peoples' person. And even as you're thinking, "isn't this a bit down-market, a bit cheesy?" you are charmed. How many opera stars do you know who could have you singing "Happy Birthday" (to him) minutes after the start of the show?
But then when you are as good as Terfel you can get away with just about anything. You can lead your conductor into the Wolves' Glen on the end of a 12-bore shotgun and immediately undercut the tomfoolery with a storming account of the evil huntsman Caspar's aria "Schweig, Schweig". You can sing "Mack the Knife" in German with an improvised street band (Kurt Weill's original orchestration albeit with a synthesised accordian) and still make every word explicitly understood; and you can sing Gilbert and Sullivan – "When the Night Wind Howls" from Ruddigore – with a clipped English accent to have your countrymen squirming.
I wish Terfel had given us "Epiphany" from Sondheim's Sweeney Todd (as on the album) instead of just "The Ballad... " (and that with a rather pallid chorus – London Welsh Chorale, Canzonetta and The Consort of Voices – instead of well-defined individuals), but his whistling Mefistofele (attention all canines) had him delving so deep into his bass extension as to almost, but not quite, slip from song into growl; and Iago's "Credo" from Verdi's Otello made something so toxic of the final word "nulla" ("nothing") as to eradicate once and for all any notion of the hereafter.
Inevitably, Baron Scarpia brought down the proverbial curtain on act one just as he does in Puccini's Tosca. Terfel has sung the corrupt Chief of Police many times on stage and even without the benefit of context his lust for opera's most celebrated diva is as palpable as it is distasteful. It was a stroke of genius on Puccini's part to counterpoint Scarpia's carnal desires with a full-blown Te Deum, but I doubt even he reckoned on a rolling bass-baritone that could so seductively ride the choral ensemble as Terfel did here. I say bass-baritone, but Terfel even poached a tenor number – "It Ain't Necessarily So" from Porgy and Bess – and so well characterised was his whining drug-pusher Sportin' Life that you almost bought the vocal deception.
He's an artist, this man, but more than that he's a born showman. And when he's bad...
Touring Birmingham Symphony Hall (18 Nov); The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester (22 Nov); City Hall, Newcastle (25 Nov) (www.raymondgubbay.co.uk)
- 1 BANNED: The most controversial films
- 2 Spotify: 1 million plays, £108 return
- 3 Trending: Multiple award winners
- 4 Picture preview: Lucian Freud drawings
- 5 Mona Lisa's 'twin sister' is discovered – 500 years late
- 6 Last night's viewing - America's Serial Killer: True Stories, Channel 4; Protecting Our Children, BBC2
- 7 OK Go: How video saved the radio stars
- 1 Spotify: 1 million plays, £108 return
- 2 Apple admits it has a human rights problem
- 3 Kate Allen: It's time for America to put an end to this shameful scandal
- 4 Lightning kills an entire football team
- 5 I was born to be a killer. Every night I see the Devil in my dreams
- 6 Now The Sun tries to call in its favours from Downing Street
- 7 BBC to issue global apology for documentaries that broke rules
- 8 Mona Lisa's 'twin sister' is discovered – 500 years late
- 9 Rhodri Marsden: What we like and what we don't like are often closer than you'd think
- 10 Modern lovers: The 'sexual body warriors' and pioneers transforming 21st-century relationships
Free trial of new Independent iPad app
Get your daily dose of the best of British journalism, sponsored by American Airlines
Win a three-week coastal jaunt
Spend three weeks exploring every nook and cranny of gorgeous Atlantic Canada.
Amazing restaurant offers
Three glasses of free champagne and a special menu at 46 top London restaurants.
Latest Independent competitions
Win anything from gadgets to five-star holidays on our competitions and offers page.
Commercial thought leaders
Watch the best in the business world give their insights into the world of business.
Career Services
Day In a Page
No secularism please, we're British
Working as a jail torturer ruined my life
New Arsenal face an old question of credibility in San Siro




Comments