Creativity Quote by Bryn Terfel

There’s a quiet flex hiding inside Terfel’s modesty. “I enjoy all aspects of singing” reads like an artist’s shrug, but it’s also a statement of range from a vocalist whose career has moved between opera’s high ceremony and the more direct pleasures of song. The key word is “luckily”: he frames versatility not as conquest but as permission granted, a nod to the gatekeeping realities of classical music where repertoire isn’t just taste, it’s branding. Sing too widely and you risk being treated like a dilettante; stay too narrow and you become a museum piece. Terfel positions himself as neither.

“Given the choice” is doing cultural work. It implies a system where choice isn’t automatic, where managers, houses, and audiences pull singers toward safe categories (the Wagnerian bass-baritone, the Welsh star, the crossover guy). By emphasizing choice, he asserts agency without sounding combative, the way seasoned performers do when they’ve learned that career politics are best handled in velvet gloves.

The subtext is also about technique as freedom. Different styles require different kinds of truth-telling: the long-breathed architecture of opera, the conversational intimacy of folk or musical theatre, the microphone’s unforgiving closeness in popular forms. Terfel’s line sells adaptability as an artistic value, not a marketing gimmick, and it lands because it’s emotionally legible: a musician admitting that curiosity, not purity, is what keeps the voice alive.