Bryn Terfel
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2003
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel. Still only in his 30s, he's sung at the world's biggest opera houses and can pick and choose where he works and the productions he wants to star in. He began singing in his first competitions at the age of three. Born into a farming family in the tiny village of Pentglas in North Wales which has only a handful of houses, one shop and one church, he was brought up singing at Chapel and regularly competed and won the National Eistedfodd cultural event.
His first language was Welsh and as a young child he had to communicate with English children camping on his parents land in the summer holidays with sign language. It was from those children he eventually learnt the language and by watching television. As a teenager, he considered being a fireman or a policeman, but he won a scholarship to the Guildhall in London and the rest is history. Since then, he's performed and recorded all the great operatic works as well as a number of 'cross-over' CDs of hits from musicals and also an album in Welsh.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an opera singer brought up in a small farming community in |
| 0:35.8 | North Wales he sang because that's what everybody around him did. He only knew |
| 0:40.1 | Welsh songs and nothing of opera when he won a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, but he was soon converted and his rich bass baritone carried him quickly to the top of his profession. |
| 0:51.0 | Now at 37 he's sung in most of the world's major opera houses |
| 0:55.0 | with many of the top sopranos and the top conductors too. He's currently preparing |
| 0:59.3 | for his biggest challenge so far, playing Votan in the Royal Opera production of Wagner's Ring in 2005. |
| 1:06.6 | But he hasn't forgotten his roots or his early love of popular music and Welsh folk song, and |
| 1:11.9 | he reckons that playing Sweeney Todd in Chicago recently was one of the |
| 1:15.5 | highlights of his career. Singing is a hobby for me he says I love |
| 1:19.8 | entertaining people I'm really just a singer who's lucky to be six foot three. He is of |
| 1:25.6 | course brin tearful. Mistaken on occasions for meatloaf I understand brin. |
| 1:30.3 | Yes that was a true story actually. I was walking from the apartment to the Metropolitan Opera House and somebody shouted across the street, |
| 1:41.0 | hey, meatloaf, can I have your autograph and of course I wrote down |
| 1:45.3 | good luck meatloaf and which made them happy. Depardieu as well I think they've |
| 1:51.7 | mistaken yes they've mistaken me for a couple of personalities and I guess it's my good looks and charm. |
| 2:00.0 | It's your size as you say six foot three and that's very important to you really isn't it in terms of performance because what you do which isn't always the case with opera singers is you act as well |
| 2:12.3 | Well, I've always had the height which stood me in good stead |
| 2:16.0 | whilst I was in school because most of my early interests were to do with sports and in a way I had to do it because it |
| 2:26.1 | counteracted the fact that I also sang and in a school perhaps singing is not |
| 2:31.8 | something that's embraced but because I had this |
... |
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