Bryn Terfel's singing is effortlessly lyrical and dramatically intense. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
Yesterday's announcement that baritone Bryn Terfel had withdrawn for family reasons from next month's Ring cycles at Covent Garden is a real blow for the Royal Opera. The company's whole autumn season was very much built around this first opportunity to see Keith Warner's production in its entirety, and the centrepiece of that was likely to be Terfel's performances as Wotan in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, and as the Wanderer in Siegfried. When the productions of the first two operas in the tetralogy were unveiled in 2004 and 2005, Terfel's singing, effortlessly lyrical and dramatically intense, was a revelation offering a musical experience that was likely to intensify as his understanding of the role deepened, and these cycles were also due to provide the first opportunity to hear him sing the role of Wanderer, which he had passed up when the Siegfried production was new.
At such short notice the company could have hardly hoped to get a better replacement for Terfel than John Tomlinson, who was already scheduled to sing the roles of Wotan and the Wanderer in the second of the three scheduled cycles, and will now take over in all three. Tomlinson is arguably the most experienced Wotan in the operatic world today, having sung the role all around the world including in the celebrated production by Harry Kupfer at Bayreuth in the early 1990s, and in the previous one at Covent Garden, the haunting version by Richard Jones.
But though Tomlinson's Wotan is always dramatically compelling, and he delivers the text with consummate understanding, his approach is utterly different from Terfel's, and quite lacking the lyrical dimension that makes the Welsh baritone's performance so exceptional. While many of us thought that Warner's densely philosophical take on the most perennially fascinating of all operatic masterpieces was intellectually cluttered and theatrically flawed, Terfel's sheer class provided its saving grace. Perhaps Tomlinson will provide a different dramatic focus to these cycles; what he won't bring, it's fair to predict, is the beauty of tone and sense of line that are Terfel's particular Wagnerian gifts.
