Review: Bryn Terfel, Royal Concert Hall

The versatile Welsh bass baritone brought his Bad Boys tour to Nottingham to coincide with his brand new album of the same name.

The bad boys in question being some of Terfel's favourite operatic villains he's played over the years. First up is the quack salesman Dr. Dulcamara from Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore who really does come over as a nasty piece of work.

Giving life to these characters both lyrically and theatrically, Terfel with more than a little help from a sixty-piece orchestra and thirty strong choir, shook the very fabric of the Concert Hall.

More undesirables are given the Terfel treatment – The Ballad of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street and TaDeum, where he plays Scarpia from Tosca are both delivered with powerful vocal finesse.

A high point, one of many, was Terfel's German delivery of Kurt Weill's Mack The Knife – in his custody the piece is given back the shock factor Ella Fitzgerald stole for her sugar coated version.

In between selections the Sinfonia Cymru, under the baton of Gareth Jones, deliver standout pieces of their own –Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre and Mussorgsky's Night On A Bare Mountain could have been heard half way up Mansfield Road, I'm sure.

Terfel closed with Gershwin's It Ain't Necessarily So – an unusual choice for a baritone but one that he pulled off admirably. He was then brought back for the ubiquitous encore whereupon he stepped into Police Inspector Javert's shoes for a rousing selection from Les Miserables.

John Medd