‘Can Honour repair a foot?’ asks Terfel’s Falstaff of one of the first violins. ‘No. Or a finger?’ He waves a finger in the air. ‘No. Or a hair?’ He deftly plucks a hair from behind Edo de Waart’s left ear. ‘No!’ There is a devil-may-care bonhomie here that could only mean one singer. This concert, filmed at the Concertgebouw last June, makes a fine memento of Terfel’s recent celebrity appearances and his larger-than-life personality in general.

The first half of the concert concentrated on Wagner. In Wolfram’s ‘O du mein holder Abendstern’ it is good to hear Terfel risking as wide a range of colours live as he has in the recording studio. Wotan’s Farewell from Die Walküre is also nicely varied, sung with a well-studied sense of line and breadth, but not really inside the character. The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra leaves something to be desired in Wagner, and de Waart does not supply the inspiration that might help bridge the gap. Having looked unexpectedly formal in the first half, Terfel relaxes after the interval for his comic arias by Mozart and Verdi, followed by a winning selection of songs from the shows, Loewe and Rodgers included. Nobody can touch him today for inspirational entertainment value in front of an audience, whether he is pretending to play Papageno’s flute across his fingers or getting the words of Man of La Mancha to send a tingle down one’s back. His last encore, a lullaby, is breathtakingly beautiful.

The DVD comes with nearly an hour of extra features, including promotional videos for various earlier Terfel CDs, a ‘Making of’ film, and the option of a dull running interview between the tracks with Terfel’s thoughts on the various arias and songs that tells us next to nothing. The singer communicates so much about the music when he sings it, perhaps there is no more left to be said.