A singer for all seasons

The hefty, affable fellow in shorts and open-collared blue shirt has a direct smile and a modest demeanor. But don’t be deceived. When bass-baritone Bryn Terfel sings Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, he becomes “a great, wounded animal,” says Opera News.

And as Wagner’s tortured god Wotan, “the still-young Welshman is the heroic baritone we have all been waiting for,” says the London Sunday Times.

Those two roles might be opposites, but Terfel finds a common thread between them.

They’re both “very dramatic,” says the singer, who most recently appeared as Verdi’s Falstaff with the Houston Grand Opera and will begin an eight-performance run in that role this afternoon with Los Angeles Opera.

“ ‘Sweeney,’ without a doubt, is operatic in its nature,” he says. “I would ask anybody to learn the soliloquy at the end of Act 1 and tell me whether it’s a musical theater piece or a dark operetta. That’s what’s wonderful about the bass-baritone repertoire. There’s such a diverse nature.”

In fact, Terfel was initially supposed to make his L.A. Opera stage debut this season in “Sweeney Todd,” but the theatrical performance rights to the show were abruptly withdrawn last spring in anticipation of a film adaptation. So the company substituted “Falstaff,” which was OK with Terfel.

“I quickly got on with my life,” he says. “I had already made my mind up I wanted to try ‘Falstaff’ in two different opera houses in America, and Houston and L.A. fitted into my concept like a glove. They chose a role that I’m very comfortable with, and it’s a kind of calling card.”

Indeed it is. British critic Christopher Norton-Welsh has called Terfel “quite simply the Falstaff of our day.”

The last and only comic opera by Verdi (forget his second, ill-starred opus, “Un Giorno di Regno”), “Falstaff” is a quicksilver version of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” with a scintillating libretto by Arrigo Boito. Verdi was in his late 70s when he wrote it, but he was still breaking new ground. The opera ends in a famous fugue, “Tutto nel mondo e burla” (The whole world is but a joke), which the characters address to the audience.

At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the presentation of Shakespeare’s boisterous Sir John and his cronies will be gloomier, however, than the one in which Terfel participated in Texas.

“The costumes and the sets in Houston were much brighter, whereas here it’s a little more dowdy,” he says. “It really shows in the first scene how desperate he is. This is the lowest point of Falstaff’s life.”

That low point includes Falstaff’s advancing age, which Terfel, a robust, young-looking 39, creates with more than makeup, wigs and padding.

“I play a lot with walking onstage,” he says. “I give him a particular movement. I give him certain problems within his legs or within his back or his heart.”

Even so, “there’s this little joie de vivre within Falstaff. There’s a glint in his eye. The little duet he has in the second act with Alice” -- Shakespeare’s “merry wife” Mistress Ford -- “has double meaning to it, and you can play it in so many different ways. It’s definitely in the score.”

Terfel definitely knows the score: He owns a facsimile of Verdi’s original to consult.

“I’ve got it at home, and if I open a nice bottle of red wine and I want to read something, I go to that score and I look at his handwriting, his notes. Falstaff is a peach of a role for a bass-baritone, whereas all the other Verdi operas are for real Italianate baritones. I would never cross over to those roles, no way -- ‘Trovatore,’ ‘Traviata,’ ‘Boccanegra,’ ‘Macbeth.’ Perhaps I would do Iago.”

If Falstaff is already a Terfel signature role, Wotan may turn out to be his second.

“The next great Wotan has arrived,” wrote Associated Press reviewer Ronald Blum after seeing him in “Das Rheingold” at London’s Royal Opera House last year. Terfel tackled the same part there in March in the next installment of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, “Die Walkure.”

The latter “was my introduction to the torrential waters of this very multifaceted, complex character,” he says. “When I got to the final scene, the floodgates opened. I’ve never, ever been so emotional on the stage as I was in the first night.”

Was he worried about comparisons with earlier Wotans?

“Oh, no, no, no. My only dilemma was to learn the role and to perform it for the very first time. People could say whatever they wanted, but I had a mountain to climb and, having done it now, it’s somehow exhilarating.”

Terfel’s career hasn’t been all roses. Although he was spared the universally savage criticism that greeted “Don Giovanni” at the Opera Bastille in Paris in 1999, even he calls his debut in that role a “catastrophe.”

“It was a monster production, and people knew it,” he says. “Parisians booed for 20 minutes after the first night, you know. But I’m not going to walk out of a contract just because the sets are ugly and the direction is senseless. I’m going to be there, and I’ll try and work.”

Terfel’s work ethic goes back to his roots. He was born in Pantglas, in northern Wales, the second son of a sheep farmer father and a schoolteacher mother. Although he went on to conquer opera stages around the world, he remains deeply connected to his homeland. He lives about 15 minutes from where he was born, with his wife, Lesley, who was his childhood sweetheart, and their three young sons.

“I was singing since I was 3, before I was out of nappies, in a way,” Terfel remembers. “You hear it in the house. There are choirs to join. There are brass bands. The church is something again. We’re Methodists in Wales. Coming from an agricultural background, you know, religion was a kind of bringing of people together from farms scattered around thousands of acres, and it was all to do with friendship and singing, because everybody loves to sing. They say you scratch a Welshman and he’ll sing for you.”

Terfel started drawing world attention after he won the Lieder Prize in the 1989 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, the same year he graduated from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London -- and promptly married Lesley.

“What I enjoyed mostly about my university days, I was learning song repertoire,” he says. “I learned close to 2,000 songs whilst I was in university. I was like Leporello, you know” -- Don Giovanni’s servant, who famously lists his master’s many conquests. “I kept this wonderful catalog of these songs.”

The fruit of that has been two discs of English songs, including the recent “Silent Noon,” which won him the best male artist prize this week at the British Phonographic Institute’s Classical Brit Awards. “I thought in the first one that I’d used all the best songs, but then I started delving more into sea shanties and songs about the sea, wonderful poets like John Masefield -- stunning.”

Terfel says he prefers song recitals to opera. “There’s such a delicacy involved in song. Opera arias come alive with costumes and sets and without taking them out of context, whereas you can create something very visual with a song through the poetry and through the music.”

Still, there is one opera he longs to do -- but it doesn’t exist yet.

“What I would dearly love would be to have an opera written for me, with my voice in mind, with my size and stature. I’ve been thinking of possible projects. One film I’m a huge fan of is ‘Citizen Kane,’ and I think that would be a perfect opera.”

Who would he like to write it?

“Carlisle Floyd, perhaps. I heard a song at James Levine’s 25th anniversary gala, ‘Ain’t It a Pretty Night,’ from his ‘Susannah.’ Beautiful. I could live with melodies, couldn’t you?”

Otherwise, he says, he’s done all the opera roles he ever wanted to do -- and that doesn’t include Alban Berg’s 1925 masterpiece about a downtrodden misfit.

“Everybody keeps on talking about ‘Wozzeck.’ I don’t get it myself. Perhaps I don’t have a modern bone in me. I know for that particular time it was considered a breakthrough in writing. It’s such a difficult play as well, isn’t it? I don’t know. I’m actually quite happy now.”

But he has even happier plans for the future.

“I’m going to take a year off in 2008 from opera,” he says. “That will be the time when I can go back to song. And to tell you the truth, I’m looking forward to it.”

*

‘Falstaff’

Where: Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 2 p.m. today and June 12; 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Friday and June 6, 9 and 15

Price: $25 to $190

Contact: (213) 972-8001 or www.losangelesopera.com