Bad Boys Bryn Terfel Goes Bad – with Singing that’s Never Been Better
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In opera, the tenor always seems to get the girl while the baritone is relegated to the role of the unsavory character. With his new recording entitled Bad Boys, Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel dives headlong into this stereotype portraying a line-up of musical villains that includes the most unscrupulous, cynical, devious and roguish figures of the opera stage and musical theater, available from Deutsche Grammophon on April 13th, 2010. Thoroughly convincing as villains you would not want to meet alone in the dark, Bryn Terfel wields a full, wide ranging bass-baritone ever in service to dramatic instincts unique for each character.
This release comes just as Terfel arrives in the Unites States to perform the role of the crooked policeman Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca at New York’s Metropolitan Opera (April 14th-24th), a role he also portrays on this disc.
The Bad Boys
Bryn Terfel calls the characters the “demonic misfits and malcontents of this wonderful music.” Some aren’t just bad – there’s a diabolical whiff about them as well. Satan himself is featured in two late 19th-century musical versions of Goethe’s Faust by Boito and Gounod. Two other characters that Boito scripted later draw from a similarly bottomless well of pure evil: the spy Barnaba in Ponchielli’s La Gioconda and Iago in Verdi’s Otello, whose machinations seem to spring from a stark opposition to “everything true, beautiful and good”. One of the most striking selections on the recording is the penultimate scene from Don Giovanni where Terfel convincingly expresses both evil and retribution in all three voices: the Don, his brother Leporello, and the ghost of Giovanni’s nemesis, the Commendatore. Supernatural evil is similarly embodied by Kaspar in Weber’s Der Freischütz. And while Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd may be motivated by revenge, the audience is gradually drawn into the darkest recesses of Victorian horror ruled by the unequivocal “demon barber” (his pie-making partner-in-crime Mrs. Lovett is a Cockney cameo here from Anne Sofie von Otter).
For Terfel, the guiding principle in portraying these different villains is above all the nature of the characters themselves, and the pathological Sweeney Todd’s macabre pathos makes this one of his favorite pieces to perform (the New York Times wrote of Terfel’s appearance that “it would be difficult to imagine a more perfect marriage of role, voice and stage personality”). A more raffish knife-wielding London villain, from rather seamier streets, is evoked in the “Ballad of Mack the Knife” from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera.
It is the thought of another murderous opportunity that prompts prison governor Don Pizarro’s raging outburst in the first act of Beethoven’s Fidelio. Where most of these characters have no problem acting on their evil instincts, the hero of Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1887 operetta Ruddigore is a harmless soul, who has to be coached in wrongdoing by the villainous Sir Roderic, who steps from his gloomy portrait to sing “When the night wind howls”. The police inspector Javert in Les Miserables acts out of an extreme sense of righteousness rather than sheer badness, as he declaims in his self-justifying solo “Stars”.
The quack doctor Dulcamara selling his miracle-working wares in Donizetti’s comedy L’elisir d’amore and the unctuous Don Basilio extolling the destructive power of a well-placed bit of slander in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia are more calculating than genuinely evil. So the best tunes may not always belong to the devil, though it is the dope-dealing Sportin’ Life – an unscrupulous and devious rogue, if ever there was one – who has one of the most memorable tunes in the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess: that irresistibly jaunty and cynical anti-sermon “It ain’t necessarily so”.
3/3/2010
This release comes just as Terfel arrives in the Unites States to perform the role of the crooked policeman Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca at New York’s Metropolitan Opera (April 14th-24th), a role he also portrays on this disc.
The Bad Boys
Bryn Terfel calls the characters the “demonic misfits and malcontents of this wonderful music.” Some aren’t just bad – there’s a diabolical whiff about them as well. Satan himself is featured in two late 19th-century musical versions of Goethe’s Faust by Boito and Gounod. Two other characters that Boito scripted later draw from a similarly bottomless well of pure evil: the spy Barnaba in Ponchielli’s La Gioconda and Iago in Verdi’s Otello, whose machinations seem to spring from a stark opposition to “everything true, beautiful and good”. One of the most striking selections on the recording is the penultimate scene from Don Giovanni where Terfel convincingly expresses both evil and retribution in all three voices: the Don, his brother Leporello, and the ghost of Giovanni’s nemesis, the Commendatore. Supernatural evil is similarly embodied by Kaspar in Weber’s Der Freischütz. And while Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd may be motivated by revenge, the audience is gradually drawn into the darkest recesses of Victorian horror ruled by the unequivocal “demon barber” (his pie-making partner-in-crime Mrs. Lovett is a Cockney cameo here from Anne Sofie von Otter).
For Terfel, the guiding principle in portraying these different villains is above all the nature of the characters themselves, and the pathological Sweeney Todd’s macabre pathos makes this one of his favorite pieces to perform (the New York Times wrote of Terfel’s appearance that “it would be difficult to imagine a more perfect marriage of role, voice and stage personality”). A more raffish knife-wielding London villain, from rather seamier streets, is evoked in the “Ballad of Mack the Knife” from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera.
It is the thought of another murderous opportunity that prompts prison governor Don Pizarro’s raging outburst in the first act of Beethoven’s Fidelio. Where most of these characters have no problem acting on their evil instincts, the hero of Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1887 operetta Ruddigore is a harmless soul, who has to be coached in wrongdoing by the villainous Sir Roderic, who steps from his gloomy portrait to sing “When the night wind howls”. The police inspector Javert in Les Miserables acts out of an extreme sense of righteousness rather than sheer badness, as he declaims in his self-justifying solo “Stars”.
The quack doctor Dulcamara selling his miracle-working wares in Donizetti’s comedy L’elisir d’amore and the unctuous Don Basilio extolling the destructive power of a well-placed bit of slander in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia are more calculating than genuinely evil. So the best tunes may not always belong to the devil, though it is the dope-dealing Sportin’ Life – an unscrupulous and devious rogue, if ever there was one – who has one of the most memorable tunes in the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess: that irresistibly jaunty and cynical anti-sermon “It ain’t necessarily so”.
3/3/2010
