Bryn Terfel Makes Welcome Debut

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

The two, separately, have infused local recitals recently 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 his West Coast debut. Los Angeles will have to wait until Nov. 4 to hear him, however.

It is not just Terfel’s heroic voice that carries the day. Nor his fine artistry. Terfel is a natural communicator. He sings with joy, with pleasure, with heart, with animation, 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. He spins out endlessly long lines, but he also sings with hearty familiarity.

Stylistically, Terfel may be more an opera singer concerned with the whole line than a poet painting individual words, however.

He sang 13 Schubert lieder, song cycles in English by Gerald Finzi and Ralph Vaughan Williams and a Welsh folk-song medley.

Among 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.”

Finzi set five of Shakespeare’s songs in his “Let Us Garlands Bring” cycle. “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,” the middle of the group, was the emotional heart of the evening. Terfel sang it with deep tenderness and restraint.

He sang six of Vaughan Williams’ nine “Songs of Travel,” with robust authority, sympathy and dignity. He has recorded the full cycle with pianist Malcolm Martineau, who accompanied him here, too, keeping a rather low profile.

There were 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, 8 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. $10-$60. (213) 365-3500.