Watch Bryn Terfel perform

To his many fans around the world, and most people who work in and watch opera, he is simply Bryn, partly because outside his native Wales, pronouncing his stage surname — actually his middle name; he was born a Jones — is a problem for many. In the UK and America, you usually hear “Turfle”, which suggests a homicidal gardener in an episode of Midsomer Murders; but at home, it’s closer to “Tare-vell”, with a lovely rolled “r” and a back-of-the-throat, guttural, almost Russian-sounding “l”. Bryn’s Welsh roots are central to his life as a man and artist, and the fact that English, which he speaks with a strong Welsh accent, is not his mother tongue helps to explain his facility with the languages of opera and art-song, and his wonderful diction in all of them. A born communicator who loves words as much as music, he has reached out to audiences way beyond the rarefied temples of opera house and recital hall.

Next month sees the release of his new album, as well as his second appearance, in just less than two weeks’ time, as the headline soloist in 2008’s Last Night of the Proms. Although he sings opera in the first half — traditionally, the “serious” part of the flag-waving annual knees-up — he has included four tracks from the album in a special BBC-commissioned medley by the composer and orchestrator Chris Hazell. The record, Bryn — First Love: Songs from the British Isles, might have been made with the last-night Prom in mind, and Bryn has chosen a song each from England (The Turtle Dove), Wales (Cariad Cyntaf), Ireland (Molly Malone) and Scotland (Loch Lomond) as a taster. The English song is available — from September 8, after the Prom — only as a bonus track download from iTunes.

“It actually started from the north of Spain, then to France, then crossing over to Cornwall and on to Ireland, like a tree spreading out,” says Terfel. “But in the end, we kept it within the British Isles because we had 150 songs, and we had to whittle them down to 16 and a bonus track. Fifteen are my choices and the other two are the record company’s. That’s fair enough, with the recording industry as it is.”

Terfel is one of a handful of singers of his generation — though he won the Song Prize at the Cardiff (now BBC) Singer of the World competition in 1989, he will still be only 43 in November, a bass-baritone’s prime — with a big Deutsche Grammophon record contract and a substantial back catalogue. He is acutely aware, however, that the multinational classical labels have changed and he is more likely to record “popular”, potentially big-selling, albums such as First Love than the great roles he is currently tackling in the opera house. “Looking at my calendar for the next seven years, there are no complete opera recordings, no oratorio recordings — it’s mainly solo stuff. It’s a bit disheartening because I have all these wonderful new roles. I know there are DVDs from the opera houses, but they don’t give you that chance of a second take like studio recordings do.”

Terfel is stoical about the economics of opera recording, and, in any case, opera is now a smaller part of his life than it was at the beginning of his career. His musical enthusiasms have always ranged wide, and popular folk songs, particularly those he sang at Eisteddfods as a young lad, are part of his heritage. “The Welsh songs, of course, I’ve known since I was a child, but, actually, most of the songs on the disc are new to me. In concerts, I like to finish with something well known and, let’s face it, these are pretty iconic British songs. I’m not the first to record them and I won’t be the last. I’ve recently done a series for television in which I sing ‘national’ songs in different parts of the country — on the summit of Snowdon, for example. I walked up the mountain — something I had never done before — and sang at the summit. We had a beautiful day, and I was able to record without any hindrance to the sound guys. Technically, it was a challenge, but I’d had a similar experience years ago when I sang Figaro at Santa Fe, which is at a high altitude. After rehearsing there for six weeks, it was like being an athlete. When I got home, I could sing arias in one breath. Now, people send me letters asking me to sing this Snowdon song everywhere.”

He feels fortunate that his operatic career began at what he calls the tail end of the “Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland” era, and that he was able to sing small roles in their later recordings and learn from these stars. “My first recording was a tiny part in Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur with Sutherland. That was such a memorable experience, working alongside one of the greats. She had such confidence as a recording artist, she was so inside her roles, that she would sit doing her needlework when she wasn’t singing. I could record Wotan in Wagner’s Ring now, but it’s a non-starter. The money isn’t there to make recordings of the Ring now. Valery Gergiev is throwing up some ideas of recording it in Russia and I might be involved, but that’s probably the closest we’ll get to it.”

Mention of Wotan brings to mind the sore point of his cancellation, last autumn, of what should have been his first appearances as the chief god in complete Ring cycles at Covent Garden. Terfel pulled out for family reasons — the youngest of his three sons had a series of operations on one of his fingers and the singer felt he should be at home to support his wife — but the opera house issued a strongly worded statement, expressing dismay. Even though fans from all over the world were disappointed, Terfel doesn’t have any regrets. “No, the decision I made was correct. I rehearsed two acts of Siegfried, and I felt that I wasn’t there. It’s the first time I have walked into an opera house and didn’t feel confident about what I could do as a performer. You know, there were things at home — my parents were away, so there were two little boys that had to be looked after. I missed two of my children’s births because I was away: one was when I was rehearsing Don Giovanni in Salzburg, and the next time I was in New York, performing Figaro at the Met. Those were the days when I couldn’t say no and didn’t have the courage to say, ‘I’ve got to be home.’ Look, it was only six performances, and John Tomlinson was there to take over. I had busloads of people coming to the Ring from Wales. They were obviously disappointed and I had to apologise to them, but they all understood.”

Clearly, Covent Garden has forgiven him, too, because he has two dates there next season: the title part in a new Flying Dutchman and Scarpia in a Tosca revival.

His family commitments, he says, mean he will now do only two series of opera performances a year, and he has kept a promise he made years ago that he would sing again with Welsh National Opera only if the company were given the theatre it deserves. So now he sings once every couple of years at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, where he is a national hero, and regularly performs for the crowds at international rugby matches in the Millennium Stadium. For WNO he has already sung The Flying Dutchman and Verdi’s Falstaff, and his next new Wagnerian role, Hans Sachs in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg — a first for him and the company — is planned for 2010. It’s a long-awaited and mouthwatering prospect for Wagnerians. There have been a couple of false starts — he should have sung the role for Opera Australia a few years ago, but pulled out when a projected DG recording in Vienna was cancelled. Earlier still, he had turned down the late Georg Solti’s offer to record live concerts of the long and demanding opera in two parts, because he felt he was too young.

Now he has picked up the challenge of a role he was probably born to sing, and is thrilled to make his debut in Wagner’s great comedy in Wales. “It’s like when you go to a favourite restaurant and get good service, great food and wine, so you’re bound to go back. As an artist, the welcome you get, the family atmosphere, the musical preparation and the theatre’s acoustic are all very important, so that’s why I like to return to WNO and the WMC.”

As for the Ring, he is scheduled to sing in the new Robert Lepage production at New York’s Metropolitan — one of the few houses, apart from Covent Garden and Cardiff’s WMC where he will continue to do staged opera — from 2010, and he will finally appear in the reprise of the Royal Opera’s Ring in 2012.

For the rest of this year, he is concentrating on concerts. The Last Night of the Proms is always a magnet for singing’s biggest names, thanks to the worldwide television audience as well as the Albert Hall’s party atmosphere. Two faces of Terfel’s personality will be on show: the opera singer in extracts from Wagner’s Tannhäuser (Wolfram’s O, star of eve), Verdi’s Falstaff (the Honour monologue) and Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca (the climactic Te Deum with massed chorus from Act I); and the populist with a canny commercial eye on international record sales in Hazell’s four-nation medley. The record could hardly get a better free advertisement. If it makes enough money for DG, maybe Terfel will get to record Wotan and Hans Sachs, after all.

Bryn — First Love: Songs of the British Isles is out on September 15. Booking for the Royal Opera’s Flying Dutchman opens on October 14

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