Bryn Terfel, Grange Park Opera review: Wagner meets Les Mis in a charming at-home concert

Having enjoyed himself playing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof for Grange Park Opera in 2015, Sir Bryn Terfel has with characteristic generosity donated his services for the Found Season, a month-long series of online concerts curated by its director Wasfi Kani.

Recorded earlier this week in his home in Snowdonia where the much-loved Welsh bass-baritone is in lockdown, the half-hour programme opened with a leak of the welcome news that Terfel will be returning to Grange Park Opera next summer to sing the title role in Verdi’s Falstaff, a favourite of his. Now he’s in his mid-50s, Terfel may push his career into new directions: knighted, fêted and honoured globally, he has nothing more to prove and he’s in the enviable position of being able to please himself rather than the business.

Here in his paneled music room, he offers a brief survey of his personal taste through a selection of songs on a nocturnal theme, with his harpist wife Hannah Stone loyally accompanying him and their pug dog and baby daughter as the sole and silent audience.

First up is that fine old Welsh hymn "Ar hyd y nos" ("All through the night"), sung chastely and slowly, without a hint of rugby-club roar, and finishing with a lovely pianissimo. After this comes "Nuit d’étoiles", an effusion of an 18-year-old Debussy, a lilting barcarolle in the style of Massenet or Bizet that ideally requires a voice fresher and younger than Terfel’s. Schumann’s "Mein schöner Stern" doesn’t come off well either. Terfel sounds uncomfortable with its lurches north and the harp can’t convincingly replicate the piano part (as Stone reminds us, it’s an instrument that can’t sustain chords).

Much more successful is Wolfram’s prayer to the evening star "O du mein holder Abendstern" from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, dispatched with serene legato underpinned by the harp’s sensuous arpeggios. In the course of the chats that precede each number, Terfel tells us that he has sung the role of Wolfram only once "and never again" – presumably because this demanding aria comes at the end of a long opera when the singer is whacked. But he performs it beautifully here.

What follows is another sort of show-stopper –  "Stars," Javert’s vow to capture Valjean from Boublil and Schönberg’s Les Misèrables, sung with crisp diction and terrific panache.  Rather charmingly, Terfel gives himself a brief round of well-deserved applause at the end of this.

Finally, as an encore, "Trade winds", a song set to a poem by John Masefield from James Keel’s Salt-water Ballads: it’s not the greatest music, to be honest, but it has a nice tune and as something that he learnt when he first arrived as a raw student the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, it has a special place in Terfel’s heart. "Don’t sing opera, Bryn," his teacher Arthur Reckless counselled him, "Sing songs." Happily, he’s gone ahead and done both – and as this very diverting little recital proves, he’s pretty good at musicals too.

Details: grangeparkopera.co.uk