Shtick clouds Terfel’s splendor

Los Angeles Opera’s announcement early this year that Bryn Terfel, the splendid and enormously personable Welsh baritone, would star in “Sweeney Todd” next season indicated just how serious the company had grown about attracting the world’s most important singers.

When that announcement was followed by the news that DreamWorks, which holds the rights to the Sondheim show, had withdrawn it from the stage because a movie was in preparation, L.A. Opera responded by brilliantly pulling Verdi’s “Falstaff” out of its hat for Terfel.

Falstaff happens to be one of the greatest roles in all opera, and if Terfel proved nothing else at his recital in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Sunday night, it was that he was born to sing it. But entertaining and vocally compelling as it was, the L.A. Opera recital came with a warning: Don’t leave this singer to his own devices.

Although he began impressively enough with a group of Schumann songs, Terfel soon began to sink under the weight of his shtick.

Let it be said that he was in magnificent voice. From the very beginning, in Schumann’s “Die Beiden Grenadiere” (The Two Grenadiers), which climaxes thrillingly with the composer’s setting of the Marseillaise, he simply cut the large Pavilion down to size.

With what seemed effortless projection, he made every word of text expressive, whether he was booming or singing whisper soft. He proved, moreover, as comfortable onstage as any entertainer, delivering art songs, folk songs and novelty songs with equal panache.

But then again, the panache was always the same. Terfel has his tricks, and they work. He loves to do a number with epilogues: a knowing grimace while his accommodating pianist, Malcolm Martineau, lingers on a final passage or chord. He loves to wow listeners with his ferocious power and then scale his imposing voice down to a barely audible coo. It’s quite a feat, because even at the threshold of hearing, you get every word and the tone remains a marvel. The only problem is that, repeated over and over again, the effect can be sappy or even maudlin. It’s one thing to hear this in Schumann and another in “Danny Boy.”

Unfortunately, there was a lot more “Danny Boy” and its like than Schumann on Sunday. Terfel can be very funny in cute songs such as Peter Warlock’s “Captain Stratton’s Fancy.” He loves nothing more than a double entendre. But when he found a hundred ways to wink in Benjamin Britten’s “The Foggy, Foggy Dew,” I kept imagining the composer responding with a hundred ways to wince.

In three numbers from Aaron Copland’s “Old American Songs,” Terfel’s fussiness proved musically destructive. How majestically he might have sung “At the River” had he not restlessly (and cheaply) changed his dynamics every two seconds, had Martineau set the proper oracular tone and stuck with it, Copland style, instead of anticipating Terfel’s every dynamic whim.

For one encore, Terfel became, for a moment, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, wandering through the audience serenading the ladies, throwing them flowers and high-fiving his pianist when he was finished.

In a well-directed production of Mozart’s opera, Terfel can be a devastatingly effective Don. On this occasion, he might as well have been auditioning for Vegas.

Bring Terfel on for “Falstaff.” By all means. But let’s hope L.A. Opera watches him like a hawk.