San Francisco Classical Voice

The irrepressible bass-baritone Bryn Terfel and his equally effervescent partner at the piano, Malcolm Martineau, presented a two-hour recital Saturday at Zellerbach Hall that ran the gamut from Brahms' Vier Ernste Gesänge ("Four Serious Songs") to the late, legendary British comedians Flanders and Swann ("The Gasman Cometh"). Brahms didn't stand a chance.

Shorn of his long locks and facial hair, and looking less Falstaffian than previously (probably because of recent back surgery), Terfel showed his enormous vocal and histrionic range in the first set of songs, by Hugo Wolf. Sounding in excellent voice throughout, though perhaps more like a baritone than a bass, Terfel merited the bard's reward at the end of the first song of the Wolf set, "Der Sänger" ("The Bard"): "your best wine/ in a goblet of pure gold," with a Bösendorfer grand piano thrown in for good measure.

After music came poetry, "Anakreon's Grab" ("Anacreon's Grave"), a beautiful setting of Goethe's poem to the Greek poet/musician Anacreon. Here Terfel produced an affectingly plangent vocal quality and was sensitive to every musical nuance. This was followed by a boisterous "Der Rattenfänger" ("The Rat-catcher") -- "the bard of songs and snatches" -- who catches rats and, sometimes, women with his melodious lute and voice. In the piano postlude, Martineau left no doubt that he and the rat-catcher had rid the town of the very last rat.

The splendid opening set was followed by a group of songs by Robert Schumann. The familiar "Die beiden Grenadiere" ("The Two Grenadiers") played to Terfel's strengths. He was his bitter and heroic best in this narrative of the two defeated fighters in the imperial army of Napoleon. In the "Zwei venezianische Lieder"("Two Venetian Airs"), Terfel displayed once again his more tender, romantic gifts.

Brahms' Serious Songs found Terfel in fine voice but strangely removed from the depths plumbed by these weighty settings of Biblical texts. Here his very gifts -- mastery of rapidly shifting coloration, vivid characterization, striking command of dynamics -- seemed to work against him, leading him to produce short bursts of phrases instead of long, meditative lines. Vision was needed, a sense of where the songs were going. Instead, his tone waxed and waned, as if his great, generous heart simply couldn't scale down to the deep humanity of these earnest songs. There were many beautiful effects but no stillness, no probing.

The second half of the program was devoted to British songs, beginning with three settings -- lovely of their simple kind -- by John Ireland of John Masefield poems, including the famous "Sea Fever." Terfel's wonderful diction -- his warm nasals and blustery consonants -- suited the songs perfectly.

George Butterworth is one of the many promising British writers, artists, and composers killed in the First World War. His settings of poems from A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, of which Terfel and Martineau presented six, portray spirited youth, and the cutting off of young lives, with terse wit and a light hand. Terfel's ability to color words and moods reached its acme more than once in these songs, especially in the heart-stopping "Is my team ploughing?," where with shifting tone and subtle facial expressions he gave full measure to the dialog between the dead man and his (live) best friend.

Terfel introduced his audience to several of the songs he'd studied under Arthur Reckless (who himself, Terfel explained, was billed on programs as "A. Reckless, baritone"): Hubert Parry's "Love is a bable," Roger Quilter's "Now sleeps the crimson petal" (Tennyson), and a rollicking, bitter song by Michael Head, "Money, O!" Songs in Welsh followed, including the rousing, traditional "Men of Harlech."

There were three wonderful, varied encores: an arrangement by Benjamin Britten of the Suffolk folk song "Foggy, Foggy Dew" (with entrancing winks, nods, and nudges from Terfel and wide, innocent eyes and appropriately lifted eyebrows from Martineau), the Flanders and Swann number (in which Martineau participated vocally, as did the original pianist, Donald Swann), and, perhaps most uproarious, another Reckless chestnut, "Tally Ho!," with Terfel thumbing his nose at the British fox-hunting class.

We are blessed to have among us such a talented, generous baritone as Bryn Terfel. We are equally blessed that he has such an astoundingly gifted piano accompanist and keyboard partner as Malcolm Martineau.

(Stephanie Friedman, a mezzo-soprano, has performed in this country and abroad, in opera and recital. She teaches singing at UC Davis and Holy Names College.)

©2000 Stephanie Friedman, all rights reserved