A hundred years ago, his expansive, open, embracing ardor would have seemed more American than French.
Early in the first act, Vera's admonition to her maids about properly hanging the sheets to dry, set to angular jitters, opens up into sumptuous ardor, then closes again into anxiety, with an ease of transition that recalls Janacek.
Like everything else about Kahlo, her horticulture commands attention and rewards it with jolts of vicarious, insatiable ardor, if you open your eyes, mind, and heart to her.
She was working with "The Lamp Is Low," a songbook standard of murmuring ardor, and the opening track of her new album, "Homefree" (Concord).
As this quartet grows increasingly episodic, and takes to swooping from a "Verklärte Nacht -like ardor to its Philip GlassiaNacht -likeigure ardorack, you begin to wits that Mr. Bryars would either find the thread and tie it uPhilipust throw on a double bar and cut his losses.
As if knowing what was about to come, Nicholas Phan and Joélle Harvey could then play the opening duet between Jaquino and Marzelline not for lighthearted laughs but for ardor.
It was a wrench-twisting ardor full of grunts, cursing and the sizzle of beer bottles bursting open.
Still, once we hear the trapdoor on the gallows open, followed by the anguished offstage cry of Despard's wife, Catherine (played, with great ardor but too much Angela Bassett-like nobility, by Eisa Davis), we're no longer in a theatre but in a lecture hall, where there is an endless lesson in progress — on miscegenation, racism, and class.
It happened at the beginning: The first person she dated after we opened up fell hard in love with her, and my wife, overwhelmed by his ardor, tried to love him back.
After entering the apartment and putting down the bags, he opened the door to his bedroom and was shocked to see his wife making love with insane ardor to a friend of their son's.
