Too often it is hard to escape the sense that Puccini's most powerful musical outbursts -- the wellings of intense emotion that tenors and sopranos mine for the recital hall -are dramatically unearned.
Soon the chorus gives way to an intense and melodically skittish tenor solo sung by Christopher Gillett.
While Cherry performed with the New York Contemporary Five, his trumpet provided a lyric contrast to the drastically intense sonic explorations of tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler when they played and recorded in Europe in 1964.
Here at last, Britten-Tippett was a theme: the tenor Toby Spence (intense and elegant in voice) and pianist Julian Milford, with the Heath Quartet and pianist Steven Osborne, combined chamber music and song, including Britten's early Holy Sonnets of John Donne and Tippett's late String Quartet No 5. Aldeburgh Voices sang works of both, and of Imogen Holst, in Blythburgh church.
Since then, he has become established as perhaps the most distinctive, certainly the most confronting and intense, of current British tenors, and what that means can be heard at Avery Fisher Hall beginning on Thursday, when he sings "Les Illuminations," by Benjamin Britten, with the New York Philharmonic under Colin Davis.
The Armory is the central place designated by the city for friends and family to report missing persons, and the tenor outside is intense but not somber.
He was well matched by Sunhae Im, a splendidly bright soprano; Jörg Dürmüller, a light but ardent tenor; and Detlef Roth, an intense, agile baritone.
And the strongest thing about a strong album, recorded live with a band including Eric Reed on piano and Stacy Dillard on tenor saxophone, is the intense, ordered, disciplined energy of Mr. Jones as an improviser of trap-set concertos.
Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana" stars the soprano Eileen Farrell, whose Met career was frustratingly brief, as an intense, vocally sumptuous Santuzza, with the tenor Richard Tucker in his glory as Turiddu.
His full-throated tenor is powerful and often intense, even for the ballads that comprise the majority of these selections.
