He is the world's best-loved bass-baritone, accustomed to performing with the finest orchestras in prestigious opera houses and concert halls around the globe; and yet Sir Bryn Terfel first learned hi...
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Daily Express
2022-09-24T23:01:00Z
"I cut my teeth learning the bass-baritone repertoire on my dad's tractor as he brought the hay in," the affable Welshman tells me. "Me and my brother Ian would quarrel for the tractor seat so dad made a rota system and when it was my turn, I had my cassettes and I stuck them on."
At 6ft 3in, Bryn is a big man with a bigger heart and so much natural warmth his laugh could boil the seaweed for your laverbread. He's in Paris when I call, after performing with conductor Gustavo Dudamel at the Opera Bastille, but the star never forgets his humble roots, nor the debt he owes to Welsh culture.
His incredible musical odyssey began years before his teenage tractor sessions, on the Eisteddfod circuit.
"I was three years old in my little sandals and shorts," recalls Bryn, 56. "I am a child of that web of finding and nurturing talent."
Once he started singing as a boy soprano in the national Eisteddfod, it felt, he says, "like breaching the heights of Everest - I was a young kid winning everywhere".
His parents hired a local recording studio to capture his voice. "On that day I was finding it difficult to hit the high notes, and the next day my voice broke. I was distraught! I could have been Aled Jones before Aled Jones!"
It could have killed his career. Instead, it was a new beginning to an unorthodox Grammy-winning journey that would see him singing World In Union with Dame Shirley Bassey, duetting with Sir Tom Jones on Green Green Grass Of Home and performing for Sting and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters.
Sir Bryn's voice works just as well in musical theatre as it does in opera - as his nine-date Songs & Arias tour, starting on Saturday, will remind us.
"I'm doing four concerts with an orchestra - one of them in Wales, which my parents are coming to - and all the rest with my wife [harpist Hannah] and a pianist [Annabel Thwait].
"My piano is still full of scores," he adds. "I'm mulling over what to include. There will definitely be Fiddler On The Roof, Welsh folk songs, operatic arias..."
Opera purists might baulk at the eclectic mix but he insists, "If you sing them well, all are enjoyable as each other. It's a palette - I love the different colours."
The first music Bryn remembers was at church on Sunday mornings where his parents sang in the choir. Older brother Ian introduced him to the decidedly less spiritual sounds of Pink Floyd, Queen and Dire Straits - "the first concert I went to was Mark Knopfler at an ice rink, our feet were so cold we had to dance," he laughs.
Bryn recalls driving his earliest car, a Ford Escort Mk 1, around Snowdonia with Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody blasting away on the basic stereo as he boomed out the "Scaramouche fandango".
His great classical inspiration was the late bass-baritone Sir Geraint Evans "who ploughed the way for the next generation, at home, in Europe and across the Atlantic; he was on a pedestal without a doubt."
Moving to London at 18, Bryn spent five years at the Guildhall School Of Music And Drama where he was tutored by Arthur Reckless (billed as 'A. Reckless, Baritone') who had also trained Sir Geraint.
After graduating, he won the Lieder Prize at the Cardiff Singer Of The World competition.
In 1988, Evans presented him with one of the biggest Eisteddfod prizes and added a gift of his own by ringing Hungarian conductor, Sir Georg Solti and suggesting he audition the farmer's son.
"I went to his home in London, he had more Grammys than I'd ever seen, Oscars...and he gave me a part immediately, as Antonio in The Marriage Of Figaro. I jumped at the chance. I cracked the nut because of one man's passion."
Terfel found himself working with magnificent European singers, "I felt like a little mouse in a big zoo filled with lions, tigers and bears..."
Initially he concentrated on Mozart - Figaro, Leporello, and Don Giovani - but proved equally adept as Verdi's Falstaff, Puccini's villainous Scarpia and Sondheim's demon barber, Sweeney Todd.
He then moved on to heavier Wagnerian roles; most memorably as Wotan in Das Rheingold leading the gods across the rainbow bridge to Valhalla.
What were his greatest highs? "When Bocelli did the concert in Central Park, New York, I was guest soloist," he recalls. Impressed, Sting asked if he'd sing a Police number at his 60
The answer was Roxanne tango style from Moulin Rouge - Sting repaid the favour four years later, duetting with Terfel for his 50
Bryn recorded Roger Waters's opera, Ca Ira - "It was incredible
