After intermission came searching intensity in a striking rendition of Beethoven's magisterial late Quartet in B flat (Op. 130).
Mr. Hamelin offered a striking rendition, opening with passionate force and contrasting the wildness of the first section with a lovely, light and deft touch in the Fugue.
The program also included an evocative performance of Ravel's "Miroirs," with a particularly striking rendition of the Spanish-hued "Alborada del Gracioso".
But when the action begins with a striking rendition of Foster's last song, "Beautiful Dreamer," by Tina Stafford and Trevor A. Williams, accompanied by Greg Hirte on a fiddle and Christopher Kirkman on a banjo, the audience relaxes into smiles.
Robert Gould, the set decorator for the mostly silent black-and-white film "The Artist," has been nominated for an Academy Award for his romantic and striking renditions of old Hollywood in the movie, which is set in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Another taken in large part from sketchbook renditions is a striking black-and-white lithograph "Sixth Avenue El" (1931), in which a tenement, a gum machine, a street light and other urban furnishings come together in a syncopated New York mélange.
The picture's major attempt to stage such a moment -- in which Lanie, drunk and disheveled, leads a throng of striking bus drivers in a spirited rendition of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," and she has the lips for it, at least -- is, by contrast, muddled and embarrassing.
Elsewhere, a striking counterpoint is established between Paul Dano's weaselly, taunting rendition of Run Nigger, Run and the slaves' defiant graveside rendition of Roll Jordan, Roll, the latter becoming an epiphanic moment that pierces to the very heart of Northup's predicament.
The combination is definitely striking: a Haim Steinbach ready-made set in a ghostly rendition of Robert Morris's gray Minimalist sculptures from the mid-1960s.
(Cheap!) Inside, much of the steel structure is completed, and the most striking feature so far on display is a 21st-century rendition of the rooftop frieze that defined the old stadium's design.
Peter Duncan, the co-creator and executive producer of the Australian version who is also co-piloting the American rendition, said Kinnear's guy-next-door quality is the most striking difference from the rapscallion persona actor Richard Roxburgh brought to the Aussie character, known there as Cleaver Greene.
