Mustering up his most menacing grimace for the front cover image -- and looking a little like the way Victor McLaglan looked in John Ford's The Informer -- bass-baritone Bryn Terfel delivers his latest DG offering, Bad Boys, a collection of arias drawn from the repertoire of the bad guys in opera: Mephistopheles, Scarpia, Iago, Sportin' Life, and others. Terfel is very much in his element and on his game here, and the recording is gloriously full and well detailed, featuring the Swedish Radio Symphony under Paul Daniel with ...
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Mustering up his most menacing grimace for the front cover image -- and looking a little like the way Victor McLaglan looked in John Ford's The Informer -- bass-baritone Bryn Terfel delivers his latest DG offering, Bad Boys, a collection of arias drawn from the repertoire of the bad guys in opera: Mephistopheles, Scarpia, Iago, Sportin' Life, and others. Terfel is very much in his element and on his game here, and the recording is gloriously full and well detailed, featuring the Swedish Radio Symphony under Paul Daniel with the expert Swedish Radio Choir tipping in at key points. The orchestrations are all original, so those who complained about the contemporary-styled orchestrations on some of Terfel's more crossover-flavored projects should have no reason to carp with Bad Boys, save the one created for "Stars: There, out in the darkness" from Les Misérables. Indeed, the weakest selections seem to be the more contemporary ones -- "Moritat" and "It ain't necessarily so" -- but these make up only a...
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