Opera singers often turn to musicals when their voices are fading. Not Bryn Terfel, who continues to tackle the toughest operas yet this year at English National Opera. He was Sweeney in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and then sang Tevye in Grange Park Opera’s production of Fiddler on the Roof.
Antony McDonald’s staging of Fiddler arrived at the Proms on Saturday, reconfigured for the Albert Hall by Peter Relton and with the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by David Charles Abell, who helped prepare the performing edition. The sets had gone, but most of the props and all of the energy survived. Fiddler is set in a Jewish community in Russia in 1905, when revolution and pogroms threaten the way of life that Tevye, the milkman, holds sacred.
Jerry Bock’s music isn’t as memorable as Fiddler’s most celebrated song, If I Were a Rich Man, but it has character. Unlike at Grange Park, voices were amplified. Terfel didn’t need it, but it hardened other voices, exaggerating the nasal quality now de rigueur in musicals. Tevye is the centre on which the action pivots. Terfel’s characterisation was richly imagined, deeply humane. Although he dominated, even stronger was the sense of a vibrant community learning to live with itself and its uncertain future.
The BBC Proms run until September 12
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