Sir Bryn Terfel’s focus in the first half of this delightful recital was on the national identity and culture of his native Wales. With Bradley Moore at the piano, Terfel began with three Welsh-language songs, the first expressing the ploughman’s satisfaction with his industrious life, the second grieving for a dead child, and the third extolling ‘The Welshman’. Terfel movingly sang the latter song with pride, clearly associating himself with the nationalistic virtues it describes – love of his country, its mother tongue and its tradition of song.
After a stirring and idiomatic delivery of English composer Frederick Keel’s Three Salt-Water Ballads, Terfel ceded the stage to his wife, harpist Hannah Stone, for a glorious rendition of a traditional Welsh tune, Bugeilio’r Gwenith Gwyn (Watching the White Wheat) in an arrangement by John Thomas. Stone, who had served for four years as Britain’s Royal Harpist, remained to accompany her husband in several traditional songs that were interspersed with ballads drawn from theatrical works by Welsh composer-actor Ivor Novello. Stone and Moore alternated as accompanists for the Novello songs, with both joining in Novello’s My Dearest Dear. Terfel had the audience laughing out loud at Novello’s And Her Mother Came Too! The title explains why the singer is never left alone with his sweetheart and provides a hilarious pun to end the first half of the recital.
After intermission, Terfel offered three Schubert Lieder, beginning with Liebesbotschaft (Love’s Message), the opening song of the Schwanengesang collection. Moore’s piano portrayed the babbling brook that Terfel gently entreats to carry a message of love to his distant beloved. Terfel’s moving rendition of Litanei auf das Fest Allerseelen (Litany for the Feast of All Souls) brought to mind the first time I heard him perform that song in Carnegie Hall with Malcolm Martineau at the piano, just a few days before All Souls Day in 1996! Then, in Auf dem Wasser zu singen (To Be Sung on the Water), singer and pianist ably evoked the shimmering waves depicted in the lyric.
Stone returned for a second harp solo, Viejo Zortzico (Old Zortzico), a lively Basque folk dance by Spanish composer Jesús Guridi, after which she remained on stage to share accompaniment duties with Moore for Terfel’s concluding set – “Songs of the Stars”, each of which references those celestial objects. Terfel and Stone combined to give Debussy’s Nuit d’étoiles (Starry Night) a melancholy reading, and then it was Moore’s turn to accompany Terfel in Robert Schumann’s Mein schöner Stern! (My lovely Star), in which the singer ardently asks a star to lift him up to heaven. Piano and harp combined in an accompaniment arranged by Jeffrey Howard to O du mein holder Abendstern, Wolfram’s passionate hymn to the evening star from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, which Terfel sang magnificently, stepping aside as his collaborators played the aria’s postlude. He then teamed with Stone in a moving rendition of the most famous Welsh song, Ar Hyd y Nos (All Through the Night), the first two stanzas sung in Welsh and the final one in English. The program concluded with all three artists performing Stars from Les Misérables in Howard’s arrangement of Claude-Michel Schönberg’s music.
Husband and wife each offered an encore: Terfel expressively portraying Tevye in ‘If I Were a Rich Man’, from Fiddler on the Roof, and Stone playing Deborah Henson-Conant’s Baroque Flamenco, accented by slaps on her instrument’s soundboard. Finally, Terfel reappeared to sing, a capella, three sea shanties that he had heard in Wales just a few days ago.
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