The Pride of Pantglas

The world’s stock of singers is rather like the stock market: a fragile, fluctuating treasure, watched on a daily basis.

Careers are tracked and rated, futures are bought and sold, and there is always that trace of panic, the gnawing notion that the stars may be singing themselves to death--a worry fed by some singers’ apparent belief that you can never be too rich or spread yourself too thin. Opera-goers seem to live in fear of waking up one morning to find that, due to a crippling vocal shortage, the seasons of the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden and La Scala have all been canceled.

So the music business has been banking heavily on the bullish bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, who, the New York Times proclaimed in a rare front-page review of his 1994 Metropolitan Opera debut in “The Marriage of Figaro,” “offers hope for a generation of opera-goers.”

This week, voice-trackers in Southern California will finally be able to judge for themselves whether that optimism is justified, when Terfel (pronounced TAIR-vel) makes his West Coast debut in a recital at the Orange County Performing Arts Center Thursday and, on Nov. 4, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

There is no question that the 30-year-old Welsh singer is a precious commodity. His voice, as critics from Vienna to Tokyo have pointed out, combines apparently effortless power with a cashmere-warm tone, and his greatest assets may not even be in his throat, chest and diaphragm, but in his head: He has a spontaneous but sophisticated musicality and an uncanny ear for the pronunciation even of languages he doesn’t speak. He is comfortable only in Welsh and English, but he treats the German and Italian texts he sings as words to be understood, not just abstract syllables helpful in beautifying the notes.

Edward Rothstein, the New York Times’ former chief classical music critic who wrote that 1994 review, remembers the way Terfel seemed to have appropriated the gruff character of Figaro and melded it with his own personality. “There was a sense of this physical energy and presence,” Rothstein says, “but executed with such sophistication and charm. It had the Mozartian effect of a rustic who knows more than he seems.”

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Terfel comes by his rusticity honestly: He grew up in the agricultural hamlet of Pantglas, Wales (“If you blink, you’ll miss it,” he says, sketching a more-or-less complete map of the village on the back of a bar napkin) and but for a music teacher’s savvy, the superstar baritone might now be a Welsh farmer with a very good voice. Opera was not part of the small, green world that Terfel grew up in, and as a boy his musical tastes ran to Elvis Presley, Dire Straits, Pink Floyd and Queen. “If you’d asked me who Pavarotti was when I was 16, I couldn’t have told you,” he says.

But Terfel’s participation in eisteddfodau, Wales’ ubiquitous local singing competitions (in which he might render, for instance, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Some Enchanted Evening” in Welsh), had already begun to uncover in him a rough but remarkable voice. So, with his music teacher’s guidance and with the view that a farmer’s life would be “too much like hard work,” Terfel auditioned for and got into the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London--a city he had only ever seen on TV.

In London, Terfel discovered just how little he knew. “We had this thing called the library,” he says. “I spent most of my time there catching up”--listening to recordings of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner and Schumann, and cramming the history of vocal music into a few brief years. Even now, he is still discovering classics. “When opera companies offer you something like [Tchaikovsky’s] ‘Eugene Onegin,’ you realize you don’t know of it,” he admits. “So you have to go see it.”

It was Terfel’s rapid success that pushed his career out ahead of his education. He did not, as most singers do, inch gradually into the limelight, working first in opera’s minor leagues or step-laddering his way up from roles like Fourth Dragoon. Instead, he seems to have sprung fully formed from an impresario’s wishful dreams.

In 1989, at 24, he went almost instantly from student to star by failing to win Cardiff’s international vocal competition but impressing British television audiences and European music professionals more than he did the jury. (He placed second, behind the Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky.)

Jeremy Caulton, former artistic administrator of the English National Opera, auditioned Terfel for the title role in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” a few days after the competition and not long after first hearing his name. “He bounded onto the stage, and we all thought there wasn’t really any need to look any further,” reminisces Caulton, now a Sony Classical record executive who would love nothing better than to woo Terfel away from his comfortable nest at Deutsche Grammophon. “He was an astonishingly, completely mature performer. And he hasn’t disappointed since.”

With his bulky jaw, his prow of a chest, and his shoulder-length sandy hair, Terfel looks more like a Viking than a musician. His frame may be just right for the out-sized passions and large-scale histrionics of the opera stage, but dressed in a yellow silk shirt and sitting on the edge of a leather chair in the swank lobby of a midtown Manhattan hotel, he seems oddly domesticated and confined, rather like a linebacker in mufti.

His eyes are puffy from too much time spent on airplanes. He is nursing a cold and he coddles his voice, leaning forward and speaking in an intimate murmur, referring to himself in the second person, as if Bryn Terfel the opera star were a generality he knows only vaguely.

“Now you get offered teas at Buckingham Palace and at 10 Downing Street with John Major,” he chuckles. “It’s a bit frightening.”

But Terfel has not abandoned Pantglas for glamour. He married his childhood sweetheart, Lesley Jones, who is now the town’s second-ranking expert on opera. They and their 2-year-old son Tomos (who will speak only Welsh for the next few years, as his father did as a child) live in a farmhouse just a few miles from the grocery store where the postmistress marked off the stages of the young Bryn’s growth on a wall, right up to his present 6 foot 3 1/2.

Although his recent career has bestowed on Pantglas a measure of improbable, reflected fame, Terfel says the town has changed little. Opera-gawkers who stop by the store looking for his birthplace find a small rack of his CDs and a bulletin board thickly covered with postcards he has sent from stops on the operatic circuit: Salzburg, Vienna, New York. Some of Pantglas’ farmers have gone to the opera a little more than they otherwise might have--two years ago, six dozen of his friends and relatives came to New York for his Metropolitan Opera debut. The boys he grew up with are still his closest friends, and they treat him with a lack of respect he finds therapeutic. “It brings you down to earth with a nice big bang,” he says approvingly.

Terfel is as faithful to his first love, sports, as he is to Wales. As a boy, he spent the prize money he won with his voice on soccer shoes, and now that he has gone pro as a singer, he still makes a beeline for a snooker table or a golf course between performances. He is also happy to take his sports vicariously, on television. “I could spend every night as a couch,” he says, truncating a not-quite-learned Americanism.

While Terfel ambles contentedly through his own life, getting back as often as possible to the farmhouse in Pantglas, which is in a state of what sounds like perpetual restoration, the rest of the music world is all aquiver with predictions, warnings and unsolicited advice. Most of that fretting centers on the widespread feeling that with his dark and brawny voice, Terfel could be the savior of a Wagnerian vocal tradition--the great Wotan hope.

“His voice seemed to have been designed by a higher power to sing this music,” wrote John Rockwell in the New York Times, after hearing him sing a take of “Die Frist ist um,” from Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” in a recording studio. Rockwell’s invocation of divine intent is fairly typical of the rhetoric that Terfel inspires, and hardly anyone disputes the statement that he would make an ideal Wagnerian--least of all the singer himself. But the fissure in the music world comes over whether he should wait to tackle music of such breadth and heft until his voice has matured a little more.

Terfel, who so far has sung Wagner only in excerpted snippets and mostly on recordings, seems to be in no hurry to do more, answering a point-blank question only with a coy hint that he’s “thinking of starting the year 2000 with a bash.” (His management is more forthcoming: He is slated to sing a relatively small role in “Tannhauser” at the Met next season, and his first Wotan in “Das Rheingold” in Munich in 2001.)

Peter Davis, New York magazine’s music critic and author of a forthcoming book on the history of American singers, believes such caution is overkill. “He’s what everybody would expect Wotan to sound like, and it’s sort of strange to see him being so shy about it,” Davis says. “Why wait until he’s 45 and won’t be able to sing it as well as he can now?”

The answer, according to Caulton, the record company executive, is not that Wagner would damage Terfel’s voice, but that it would cut off other, lighter roles too soon. “Once you get involved in the Wagner, you get deeper and deeper into it, and it does change you--your voice gets darker and heavier. I’m afraid whole areas of the repertoire could disappear.”

The fuss is symptomatic of a career that has crossed the line into an extra-musical phenomenon, and it reflects as much on the anxieties and yearnings of the opera world as on Terfel’s own virtues or faults. The barrage of coverage that Terfel’s Met debut set off focused as much on what he could be expected to do as on what he had already done.

To Davis, it was a case of publicity manufacturing a star. “There are lots of artists who are very good and make debuts and they don’t get greeted like that,” he says, referring to the Times’ decision to run Rothstein’s review on the front page.

Rothstein acknowledges that the New York Times, by first printing Rockwell’s expressions of ecstasy as a prominent feature article a few days before the performance, had to some extent backed itself into a corner. “It was a bit a case of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Since the paper itself had proclaimed there to be so much anticipation, there was a news aspect to how this debut went.”

Terfel, who has never had a publicist, is gratified by all the attention, but seems to agree with Davis that it has little to do with how well he sings. “These things are created by other people,” he shrugs. “If people want to put me on a pedestal then that’s their problem.”

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Bryn Terfel recital, Thursday, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, 8 p.m., $10-$38, (714) 553-2422; and Nov. 4, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., 8 p.m. $10-$60. (213) 365-3500.