At the very moment when John is in agony on the floor, as "the Holy Ghost was speaking", he feels "a tightening in his loin strings" and "a sudden yearning tenderness for Elisha... desire, sharp and awful".
That's why there's (almost) nothing satirical about Payne's wry and sarcastic comic views of the Grant family, both nuclear and extended — his jibes are distributed all around with equally sharp pokes, if not quite with equal tenderness (he reserves a particular place in comic hell for the craven and the unsentimental).
The opening Romance, in F-sharp minor, harks back to Frédéric Chopin's tenderness.
In a move characteristic of Tenorio's method, the tenderness between the two men is given sharp poignancy when it's revealed that they once shared a kiss, and that Fortunado has been "counting off days and weeks since it happened, believing that enough passing time would blur the night into one that perhaps never happened at all".
For an encore, Mr. Entremont played Chopin's Polonaise in C sharp minor, conveying both the burly vigor and the ruminative tenderness of this mercurial work.
His completely original voice and sensibility — a blend of sharp and always surprising observation, free-floating digression, ambiguous irony, impishness, tenderness, curiosity, and detachment, all overhung with constant, circling doubt — remain stubbornly resistant to all but ersatz imitation.
For all their outlandishness, and their sharp-eyed clarity, the portraits in this show inspire a certain tenderness in the viewer that sets them apart from other Giacometti figures, such as his starkly striding men.
Rapp's ferociously sharp writing is matched in Richard Beecham's production by three magnetic performances that wring out every scrap of viciousness, tenderness and dark, doomed romance.
