After an intermission awkwardly prolonged by a few dozen audience members returning to their seats for the Webern with the alacrity of children facing a dentist's chair, Mr. Rattle and the orchestra presented the most exactingly voiced, intensely characterized account of the Six Pieces I have ever heard.
She offered a stunning "Vissi d'arte," wielding her gleaming, silvery voice to intensely expressive effect.
Either way his renditions of standards by Mr. Waits, Bob Dylan and Randy Newman, to name three songwriters whose work he sang at Tuesday's opening-night show of a two-week engagement, were tough, rhythmically sneaky reinventions to which his voice imparted an intensely personal stamp.
The stage-hungry dramatic ferocity is as startling as the technical bravura that makes his lean, intensely focused voice blaze like a hero's.
"Sometime, to make people understand me," she said to me a couple of years ago, her "S es disappearing into whatever linguistic void French people's final consonants go when they die, "I have to write sing down!" It was odd to hear this intensely French voice wrapping its guttural noises around Americanisms.
Lobo Antunes, one of the most skillful psychological portraitists writing anywhere, renders the turpitude of an entire society through an impasto of intensely individual voices.
The question of what exactly China is prepared to do in combating climate change is, of course, intensely politicized; voices on either side can marshal evidence to demonstrate the strength or weakness of China's commitment.
He consistently called out the media for giving more airtime to the more intensely senseless voices in the political spectrum, which is why many have framed the entire interview weekend as some sort of Obama-versus-the-media spectacle.
Prégardien may now be nearing the age at which many singers turn their attention to giving masterclasses rather than vocally demanding recitals, but there were only a few hints that his voice was no longer the intensely flexible instrument it once was.
He's clean now, and in truth, his voice is sober, focused and intensely excited about his next venture: saving the American housing crisis.
