"restrained passion" is correct and usable in written English.
You could use it to describe someone or something that has some emotion, but that emotion is kept in check. For example, "Her restrained passion was evident in her eyes, but she kept her composure."
Not that Gilbert parrots Bernstein's Nielsen style: his interpretations may be a shade cooler and less mystical, but they have a combination of intellectual command and restrained passion that has, in the last several years, inspired the musicians of the Philharmonic to give of their very best.
In the middle of "Spiritual," the first tune of Charlie Haden and the Liberation Orchestra's second set at the Village Vanguard on Thursday night, the saxophonist John Stubblefield stood up and delivered an improvisation loaded down with moans, bent notes, blues phrases and high dog-call notes that signaled un restrained passion.
Here was precision, clarity, restrained passion and instrumental brilliance.
While he doesn't have Charles' unbridled power (who does?) Winwood does sing with a restrained passion that's carefully and cannily unleashed.
Playing Jimmy, a Blackfoot Indian and World War II veteran who suffers from mysterious symptoms that resemble post-traumatic stress, Benicio Del Toro gives a restrained performance, bottled-up passion glinting from the corners of his eyes.
The Brontë sisters may have lived in a time and place we consider more courteous and restrained, but their fiction celebrated stormy, unchecked passions and determined individualism, even in the face of society's disapproval.
From simple folk melodies to churning Romantic passion, Mr. Keenlyside, always intelligent and restrained, let the songs' emotional extremes speak for themselves.
Now this seductive painting in which Vermeer (usually such a restrained, cool, cautious artist) seems to indulge a secret passion, has a new, or rather reinvented, home.
WITH "Righteous Love," Ms. Osborne is trying to have it both ways: she wants to express raw passion and sexual heat but do it in a restrained enough way to be digestible by a wide audience.
All of this yields something restrained and deliberate that is the very opposite of a flood of unbridled passion.
As they grow older, the Hardy girls' shared passion for Maurice escalates the warfare between them, and Hay's restrained prose beautifully evokes their silent rages.
