Fresh from her triumph at the Metropolitan Opera in the title role of Gluck's "Iphigénie en Tauride," she comes to Avery Fisher Hall to offer another impassioned French-language portrait, Berlioz's scène lyrique "La Mort de Cléopâtre".
He shot a few vignettes — a history of the universal language Esperanto, a portrait of an American exile in Havana — that each said something about idealism in an anti-utopian age.
But the real wonders here are the author's exuberantly inventive language and her vivid portrait of a heroine who is wise beyond her years.
In that poem Sapphire's fierce language created a disturbing portrait of a troubled adolescent, so damaged and unhinged that he is capable of going out and beating a stranger half to death.
The play, with its incendiary language and its merciless portrait of a 47-year-old nebbish who embraces his own worst nightmares of racial and sexual subjugation, is really a surreal spiritual fable that riffs on a notion voiced by Edmond that every fear hides a wish.
The language is extraordinary, the portraits indelible, and then there are those lines at the end that just about freeze your heart: "The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached.
Invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839, the technique – applying household salt to paper before coating it in silver nitrate solution – created a new, richer and more detailed visual language, transforming still lifes, portraits and landscapes.
To celebrate the centenary of Hergé's birth in 2007, Belgian Post issued a sheet of 25 stamps depicting the album covers of all 24 Adventures of Tintin (in 24 languages) plus Hergé's portrait in the center.
After all, the bureau's primary goal in asking this question is not to paint a full and complete portrait of the language proficiencies of Americans but rather to track immigrants' integration into mainstream American society and to ascertain what services they need, and in what languages.
But other than the violently cropped self-portraits, where the body language is pure agony, this is the only portrait in the show.
Keep at it with the big signatures, self-portraits and self-congratulatory language.
