Word: 18th
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...institute is so little known and so anachronistic -- a club, chapel and classroom complex for merchant mariners -- that it seems like a novelistic conceit. Its fey charms evidently inspired James Stewart Polshek as he designed its new quarters. Instead of creating a boringly deferential pseudo- 18th century building, he has both respected tradition and done something entirely original. From a new, neighborly four-story red brick base, Polshek has popped two prow-shaped floors clad in a modernist grid of white enameled metal. Such a building could be tricky and meretricious, but Polshek, one of the finest uncelebrated architects working...
Mercifully, Ghosts is not much about romantic drears, or even introspection. Corigliano set out to compose an opera buffa, an 18th century-style comic opera such as Figaro or Cosi Fan Tutte. As realized on the stage, scene after scene has a vivid, antic quality that somehow escapes being overly busy. Exploiting the vastness of the Met stage, designer John Conklin deploys props -- solid, handsome, witty -- in ever shifting assemblages. Director Colin Graham sends ghostly ladies flying gently through the air, each looking like a Fragonard dreamscape. Whatever their sins against the people, these aristocrats have found a happy repose...
Among several lavish set pieces, the showstopper is a Turkish scene at the end of the first act. Such exotic interludes were a vogue in the 18th century, and Corigliano and Hoffman mock the form with glee. The setting is an outlandish reception at the Turkish embassy, presided over by a 12-ft. foam pasha from whose mail-slot mouth a bass voice emerges. As the sultry singer Samira, mezzo Marilyn Horne reclines lasciviously on a plushy couch and tosses off a florid cavatina and cabaletta to words from an Arabic phrase book ("I am in a valley...
...task ahead for Keating, 47, is hardly enviable. Labor fortunes continue to sag as the country's recession drags into its 18th month, with unemployment running at a 60-year high of 10.5%. Keating, who designed the economic- liberalization program that precipitated the country's slump, must now prove he is also the man to put the economy back on track. Scoffs conservative leader John Hewson: "Putting in Mr. Recession to get us out of the recession is the ultimate irony...
...everybody's going to say we solved all the problems of the world. If you could go back through Harvard records of the 18th and 19th centuries, you would probably find records of town-gown strains," says James P. Maloney, committee member and finance director for the city of Cambridge. "But we took a giant step forward in understanding each other...