Not everyone who came to Cardiff last weekend was searching for Oasis. A couple of thousand were making the pilgrimage to see Bryn Terfel - and for them Christmas arrived early.

Adopting the rugby adage "Get your retaliation in first", Terfel so vehemently defended his right to do cross-over numbers that he could probably have slipped in a few of the Gallagher brothers' songs and got away with it. In fact, the programme was a veritable Christmas Bryn-tub, with Welsh, Austrian and English carols, and a themed sequence of stars, moon and sky that combined classical and festive - and CD opportunism. It is Terfel's gift not only to find the lyrical essence of a song, but to deliver the words - whatever the language or genre - with clarity and sincerity, and it would be a truly cross-patch Scrooge who objected to the schmaltzing up of traditional numbers or to Man of la Mancha's Impossible Dream following hot on the heels of O du Mein Holder Abendstern from Wagner's Tannhaüser. Terfel did both with conviction.

Guest soprano Sally Matthews sang arias from Handel's Messiah and Dvorak's Rusalka (Song to the Moon), but it was in the duet, Bess You Is My Woman Now, from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, that she and Terfel shone, their voices and gestures gelling effectively. Conductor Gareth Jones and his Sinfonia Cymru orchestra demonstrated their versatility in all this, creating mood as well as accompanying sympathetically. The Gershwin, spirituals and John Williams's music for Hedwig from Harry Potter created a sub-theme linking to the final American Yuletide medley in which the mellifluous Serendipity choir came into their own. I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas inevitably figured, but Terfel managed to resist the Bryn does Bing impulse and got the audience to join in instead. They didn't need asking twice.