Michael Ball wins hearts of adoring Eisteddfod audience

 * Michael Ball wows the Pavilion crowd at his concert last night.

Michael Ball’s opening number of his barnstorming Saturday concert at Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod was Best Night of Your Life and that’s exactly what he sweated to make it for a packed Pavilion audience on a sultry summer evening.

Warning them that it was so hot that he almost came in shorts, he followed up with the aptly-titled Some Guys Have All the Luck, which indeed he has had over a five-decade career which has seen him become one of Britain’s leading musical theatre stars, a Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum recording artist and a hugely popular radio and TV presenter.

He is also an accomplished songwriter, a talent which was displayed in Tennessee Dreams, a Country-inspired piece that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in Nashville. We stayed in the Deep South for The Gambler, nipping over to Memphis for Elvis’s I Just Can’t Help Believin’.

He clearly loves material by the guys with big voices and he skilfully applied his own to a shattering version of Tom Jones’s Fall in Love. By this time the audience had fallen deeply in love with him - if they hadn’t already done so years ago.

* ... and told them how happy he was to be in Llangollen.

Glow, the title track from his latest album, then got a spectacular airing as did the moving You which he also penned.

Favourites abounded and the next one up, The Rose, didn’t disappoint. Neither did He Lives in You, from Lion King, which saw another powerhouse of a delivery.

No Ball show would be complete without the tear-jerking Empty Chairs from Les Misérables, the musical in which he has had a few starring roles since the dawn of his long career. One of them was police officer Javert who sings the moving Stars and which he presented next.

Another biggie, the patriotic Anthem, he made a tribute to Wales, a country in which he has deep family roots.

It was then time to prove that he can also rock, which he did in style with Vintage from his 23^rd studio album, Let’s Just Dance and You Can’t Stop the Beat.

Another one he wouldn’t have been allowed to neglect was Loves Changes Everything, a breakthrough number of his from wayback when. 

There was a tribute to his own performing arts profession with On With the Show before he reached a parting crescendo with Elvis’s The Wonder of You winning a standing ovation in the process.

Before he left the stage he described the Eisteddfod as a “wonderful tradition” which made him proud to be part of. And in the adoring eyes of Pavilion audiences he will clearly always be that.