Bryn Terfel, opera’s good sportsman

On a cool autumn afternoon, Bryn Terfel was sitting in the plaza outside the Metropolitan Opera House, talking golf. He was wearing black running pants and a jersey emblazoned with the logo of the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team.

One of opera’s marquee stars is a huge sports fan — and bears a remarkable resemblance to the late Rams great Merlin Olsen. Terfel is 6-foot-4 and has the demeanor of a genial country pastor. With a slice of regret in his voice, Terfel was lamenting that he couldn’t attend the Ryder Cup golf tournament, which had concluded two days before in his beloved homeland, Wales. He had to sing the lead role of Wotan in the Met’s new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.

Yet Terfel got up every morning at 6 in his hotel to watch the tournament on TV. He was thrilled the European team had won, though felt bad for American golfer Hunter Mahan, who lost the deciding match.

Along his own course in classical music, Terfel, 45, has been one of most lavishly praised singers in the past 25 years. Critics have poured superlatives on his roles as Falstaff and Figaro and on his numerous recordings, ranging from Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” to Welsh folk songs. (His show tune albums have taken a few punches.)

“Bryn is a force of nature,” said pianist Malcolm Martineau, who will accompany Terfel on Monday in a recital at Walt Disney Concert Hall, centered on the stirring songs of Schumann.

His deep baritone can hold you in its dark clutches like pealing thunder and then release you with the gentleness of a butterfly in flight.

Where does that incredible voice come from? As Terfel offered, all of his artistic paths lead back to Wales, where he grew up in the rural, mountainous north, the son of a sheep farmer. “Undoubtedly I wouldn’t be where I am without the grounding that this wonderful small country gave me as a performing artist,” he said.

Wales is called the “land of song” for good reason. Music is woven so deeply into Welsh culture that children gravitate to singing as naturally as to soccer. And singing in Wales is fostered in a cultural environment as competitive as sports.

From the time Terfel was old enough to kick a ball, he was singing in community choirs and competing in his local “eisteddfod.” The Welsh tradition, dating to medieval times, pits singers, poets and musicians against one another in performance contests. The competitive eisteddfods paved Terfel’s way to important singing contests in music school and college, which he won, and which launched his professional career.

“I had a certain comfort being on stage and being adjudicated for what you’d just done,” he said. “In eisteddfods, there was definitely a regimen. You had to know your pieces well, you had to know the poetry well, you had to sing in tune really well. I actually started as somebody who recites poetry.”

Like Dylan Thomas? “No, gosh no,” he said with a laugh. “Simple Welsh poetry. But funny you say Dylan Thomas. I was at the White Horse Tavern last night, the pub where he drank himself to an untimely death.”

Terfel was enjoying the look homeward.

“There’s an art form in Wales called cerdd dant, which is singing poetry to a given harp tune,” he said. “There was a man in the next village who was one of Wales’ foremost writers of the tunes. He coached me from a very early age. I sometimes kick myself to think why I’m here now.”

There’s a melodic quality to Terfel’s speaking voice. Because Welsh is his first language, he articulates each word in English as if he had to consciously draw out the music and meaning of each syllable. You can hear the distinction on his new album, “Carols & Christmas Songs.” Terfel sings popular holiday tunes in, respectively, English and Welsh. Both versions are felicitous, the Welsh more so.

Immaculate diction, Terfel said, was the key to his singing. And achieving it was no easy feat. This year he faced his biggest vocal challenge when he took on the role of Hans Sachs in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg” for the Welsh National Opera.

Finding the perfect vocal pitch for each of Wagner’s precise German syllables “was a ball and chain for four years,” he said. “You’re on an airplane thinking, ‘Is it der? Dee? Dus? My score is covered with wine, blood, grass stains. It’s been thrown across the music room. But it’s all a part of learning a piece of new music.” And when he finally got it right? “It was a monumental joy,” he said.

Because we were sitting outside, and no doubt because Terfel’s face, in Norse god regalia, was posted on billboards and buses around the city, many people recognized him and smiled as they walked by.

Terfel’s reputation as a family man stirred a tempest in opera’s teapot in 2007. When one of his three sons, who was 6 at the time, broke his finger and required surgery, Terfel withdrew from singing Wotan in London’s Royal Opera House production of the “Ring.” One opera critic lectured him: “The show goes on though the bombs are falling; the enterprise is bigger than you are.”

Terfel brushed off the criticism. “I had two other children to look after while the one who was having his operations was with his mother,” he said. “I have given enough to this profession to be able to cancel, I think. If it happened again today, if I was told one of my children is going to have an operation, I’d be home straight away.”

Terfel’s guy-next-door quality is a big part of his popular image. It’s also who he is. He and his wife, Lesley, his teenage sweetheart, and their three boys live in a farmhouse not far from where they grew up.

“I’ve known Bryn for 25 years, and he has not changed one iota by being a star,” said Martineau. “‘Ordinary’ is the wrong word because Bryn is extraordinary. He brings an amazing talent to the ordinary.”

Because Terfel prefers not to be away for long periods, he sings only a few operas a year. He loves recitals and hopes someday soon to commission a new song cycle for himself. “But the songs have to be my choice of poetry,” he said.

The centerpiece of Terfel’s Disney Hall recital is Schumann’s Opus 39 “Liederkreis.” Schumann composed the songs, based on acutely melancholic nature poems, during the agonizing months in 1840 he spent waiting to see if a court would allow him to marry his beloved Clara over her resentful father’s objection.

For Terfel, performing the intensely yearning songs feels like a journey home. “Schumann for me is all about nature and poetry and rivers and grass and trees,” he said. “It’s exactly what I sang about as a child in eisteddfods. Schumann can be incredibly delicate but also incredibly powerful.”

Terfel and Martineau recorded the famous songs in 2000, although Terfel, Martineau said, has continued to mature as a singer. “His voice is less bass-y than it was,” he said. “The pivot in his voice has gotten slightly higher. He never had any trouble singing the top. But for me the color of his voice is more interesting because it has more brightness in it these days, with no less power.”

Terfel explained that when he’s performing at his peak, he always thinks, “I wish I could have that same note every night. But it’s different every night. That’s what’s quizzical about the human voice. It’s like hitting a golf ball. You don’t know. It can go left, it can go right. Or they can come back like they did for Tiger in that last round in the Ryder Cup.”

He paused and seemed to think for a moment about his analogy between singing and golf. He grinned and said, “We’ve come full circle, haven’t we?”

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