SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Schumann, Finzi, Ibert: Bryn Terfel (bass-baritone), Malcolm Martineau (piano), presented by Cal Performances, Zellebach Hall, University of California at Berkeley, 20.11.2010 (HS)

 

Even standing quietly, hands by his sides, Bryn Terfel can’t help but make a theatrical connection with his audience. An arch of the brow, a suggestion of a smile here, a scowl there, morphs into a face that comments, underlines or contradicts the music he sings. Sitting in the audience, it’s a dilemma to decide between watching him or reading the words in the foreign-language songs.

Though the Welsh bass-baritone takes every opportunity to inject a note of theatricality, it’s never at the music’s expense. When he lets it loose, his voice powers gloriously through the full baritone range, but he can also control dynamics to a gorgeous pianissimo, maintain breath control to let a phrase hang dexterously, and shape a phrase so that the drama seeps through naturally. That, and his personality, gets an audience on his side.

By the close of his recital Saturday night, the recital had turned into a party. He had the half-full crowd at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley singing along with “Home on the Range” and voicing lusty “ha-ha” interjections in Franco Leoni’s juicy “Tally-Ho” song. “You’re much better than that lot last week in Carnegie Hall,” he noted slyly.

Things had already loosened up in the closing set of his program, a warm tribute to the American-born bass-baritone of Welsh extraction John Charles Thomas, wherein the audience participation. An encore involving a dragon with 13 tails unhinged things entirely. But these late-in-the-concert hijinks were well earned. He paid serious attention to the musical details and employed embellishments with a light touch in an all-Schumann first half, a lapidary set of Finzi songs on Shakespeare, and a charming group of Ibert songs on Don Quixote. His long-time pianist, Malcolm Martineau, contributed playing that breathed with the singer and delicately etched colors around the voice.

 

The Schumann songs, built around the Liederkreis song cycle (which Terfel recorded more than a decade ago) offered plenty of drama, concerned as they are with contrasts between life and death, joy and despair. Terfel’s gift for storytelling came through vividly in the various voices of “Waldesgespräch” (conversation in the wood), the astonishing colors he can bring to the voice in “Zwielicht” (twilight) and “Frühlingsnacht” (spring night).

To open the evening, storytelling made “Belsatzar” into a virtual operatic scene with little more than voice variation, from the blaspheming of King Belshazzar, the title character, to the devastating final line, ending on a solid low F. “Die beiden Grandiere,” a tale of two French grenadiers yearning for home after a defeat, offered more opportunity for scene-setting, and the singer’s long, hesitant walk offstage during the solo piano postlude to “Mein Wagen rollet langsam” ended the first half slyly.

The highlight for me was Finzi’s ravishing set, “Let Us Garlands Bring,” which emphasized Terfel’s intimate side, seamless legato and breathtaking economy of expression. Completed in 1942, the songs excerpt from four Shakespeare plays, using the British composer’s penchant for diatonic and pentatonic phrases to beautiful effect. In “Come Away, Come Away, Death” (from Twelfth Night) the high-lying opening phrases floated hauntingly. “Who Is Sylvia” (from Two Gentleman of Verona) took on a semi-salacious cast and “Oh Mistress Mine” (also from Twelfth Night) a wistful feeling. The extended legato in “Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun” (from Cymbeline) played poignantly against Martineau’s pulsing accompaniment, and the final romp through “It Was a Lover and His Lass” (from As You Like It) danced forth like a mountain spring.

The Ibert songs made for a pleasant breather between the Finzi set and the tribute to Thomas. Terfel outlined the singer’s story, from his Carnegie Hall debut in 1924, his operatic debut as Amanasro in Washington, D.C., and his European career in Brussels and London, including an appearance in Faust with Feodor Chaliapin in 1928. But it was his nationally heard radio program in the U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s that made him into a familiar name.

Drawing from Charles’ repertoire of opera, operetta, American art songs and humor, Terfel illustrated the bio with five songs, including a rousing “When the Night Wind Howls” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore, a lovely setting of the traditional American song “Home on the Range” (arranged by David Guion) and concluding with “The Lord’s Prayer” (arranged by Albert Hay Malotte), both written for Charles.

Terfel’s first encore was “Trade Winds,” Frederick Keel’s evocative setting of the John Masefield poem, the third and last the aforementioned “Tally Ho.” But the singer’s penchant to revel in musical humor—he once ended a Cal Performances recital with a series of Flanders and Swann songs—found its high point in “The Green-Eyed Dragon” a children’s song from 1926 by Wolseley Charles (words by Greatrex Newman). Thomas sang it often in his recitals, according to a fan who gave Terfel the yellowing sheet music after his Carnegie Hall recital last week. Despite reading from the music, Terfel reveled in its rhythms, rapid patter and barbaric descriptions. He appears to have found another audience-winner.

Harvey Steiman