Terfel: Natural Born Lieder : Expressive, Heroic-Voiced Baritone Rises in West With Costa Mesa Recital

What is this nonsense about recitals being a dying, if not already dead, art form? Somebody had better inform mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli and baritone Bryn Terfel.

The two, separately, have infused local recitals with amazing vitality and personality.

Bartoli sang at the Orange County Performing Arts Center last year, and Thursday it was Terfel’s turn. Both appearances were sponsored by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County.

The 31-year-old Terfel was making not just his West Coast recital debut, but his West Coast debut, period. Los Angeles will have to wait until Nov. 4 to hear him at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in recital.

It is not just Terfel’s heroic voice that carries the day. Terfel is a natural communicator. He sings with joy, with pleasure, with heart, with animation, with his face, his eyes as well as with his voice, with the human touch.

And he does it all with apparent ease.

He fills the hall with a dark, virile sound, but he also scales down the voice seamlessly to a near murmur and changes vocal color to warm amber. He spins out endlessly long lines, but he also sings with hearty, comradely familiarity.

He talks to the audience. He makes self-deprecating jokes. He tells them that he’s changed the program to include a medley of Welsh folk songs because he doesn’t “want to be plastered with leeks” by his countrymen, who inevitably attend his programs. (Leeks have been associated with the Welsh since at least the time of Shakespeare’s history plays.)

Stylistically, Terfel may be more an opera singer concerned with the whole line than a poet painting individual words. That approach has its rewards, although many lovers of lieder would prefer the closer and more intimate interpretation of the texts.

Not for nothing do people believe that great lieder singers take decades to develop their art, and Terfel is still a youngster in that regard, though vocally at a vibrant and fresh peak.

The first half of his evening consisted of a baker’s dozen of Schubert lieder, the second of song cycles in English by Gerald Finzi and Ralph Vaughan Williams, in addition to the folk song medley.

“I would like it if you would not applaud between the songs,” Terfel told the audience, which promptly ignored his request. Applaud they would, even when he waved them to stop, even when he turned his back on them.

He made another plea before singing Finzi’s lovely song cycle, “Let Us Garlands Bring,” and this time they respected it.

Finzi set five of Shakespeare’s imperishable songs drawn from plays. “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,” the middle song of the group, proved the emotional heart of the program, with Terfel singing with deeply felt restraint and tenderness.

In the Schubert songs, he was gripping and dramatic in “Gruppe aus dem Tartarus” and “Erlkonig,” expansive in “An die Musik,” playful in “Heidenroslein,” moving in “Litanei auf das Fest aller Seelen.”

He did not break hearts, however, in “Du bist die Ruh’,” nor create a sense of a miracle happening in “Ganymed.”

He sang six of Vaughan Williams’ nine “Songs of Travel,” tracing the trajectory of the narrator’s life with robust authority, sympathy and expressive dignity. He has recorded the full cycle with pianist Malcolm Martineau, who accompanied him here too, keeping a rather low and modest profile but providing exactly the support Terfel must want.

Terfel sang two encores: “Tallyho” by Franco Leone and “How to Handle a Woman” from Lerner and Loewe’s “Camelot.”

* Bryn Terfel will sing songs by Schubert, Ibert and Vaughan Williams on Nov. 4 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. 8 p.m., $10 to $60. (213) 365-3500.