Hitting the half-century mark is generally a festive occasion, with the birthday boy or girl being deluged with love and lavish gifts. In the case of Bryn Terfel, however, he’s the one who’s doing the giving. The Welsh-born, internationally acclaimed bass-baritone turns 50 on November 9, and to mark this rite of passage he’s touring a concert program that surveys where he came from and who helped him along the way, before concluding with a subtle suggestion of where he might go next.

“The narrative really is ‘Bryn at 50’, ” the singer reveals, in a telephone interview from his Vancouver hotel. “The first song [Idris Lewis’s "Can yr arad goch"] was the first song that I ever learned as a bass-baritone, which my grandmother, from my father’s side, was very adamant that I should learn, because it’s all about what a farmer’s son should be doing—looking after his land and enjoying his life working on that farm. So that song always brings back incredible memories, as do any of those first four Welsh songs.

“And then,” he adds, “the program kind of goes into English song, and this comes straight from the process of becoming a professional singer. My first singing teacher, Arthur Reckless, instead of opera arias, he would give me English songs. So my first three years of technique was through English song, and I became a big fan of that medium as well.”

The English works on the program reflect more than just Reckless’s teaching: they’re also a nod, Terfel suggests, to the port cities that feature prominently on his touring itinerary. Frederick Keel’s folk-inflected “Salt-Water Ballads” share the modest beauty of the Welsh material, but in the second part of his Vancouver Recital Society concert, Terfel will head into more demanding terrain, with lieder from the greatest German composers of art song, Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert.

“In anybody’s career, once you leave college, Schubert and Schumann become a very important facet of stepping back from the operatic performing to those genius composers who can describe anything in one page, in two verses,” he says. “For instance, Schubert’s Litanei is one of the most beautiful songs—and I’ll sing that as one of the encores, hopefully.

“That touches on the fact that my second singing teacher was from Germany,” he continues, “and was completely different from Arthur Reckless in the fact that he made me learn two or three songs, by memory, every week. Which, of course, sharpened my knowledge of song, but also of how to learn very quickly—and that was something that became apparent in my career over the next 25 years. Sometimes you have to learn something at the drop of a hat, and thankfully, I have that facility now.”

Mastering Schubert’s demanding “Gruppe aus dem Tartarus”, in particular, could be seen as an indication of where Terfel’s headed next.

“There’s nothing like being on the stage singing a Schubert song,” he says. “You can’t compare it to any other composer. And I just hope that in the future I’ll be able to learn 'Winterreise', for instance. In the Guildhall [School of Music] I learned some of the other song cycles.…but there’s one gaping hole, which is that winter journey.”

That Terfel is considering both learning and recording “Winterreise” suggests that he’ll be giving us musical gifts for many years to come.

“Isn’t it amazing that, even at 50, you can have something to aim towards?” he says. “There are wonderful things on the horizon.”

 The Vancouver Recital Society presents Bryn Terfel, with pianist Natalia Katyukova, at the Orpheum on Wednesday (May 4).