The celestial city brought down to earth : Dmitrij Cernákov's interpretation of Rimskij-Korsakov's opera the invisible city of Kitež and the Maiden Fevronia

Rimsky-Korsakov's penultimate opera is tied to the symbolist movement in fin de siècle Russia. Although the composer did not intend it as a mystical work in the wake of Wagner's Parsifal, his symbolist collaborators invested much symbolist thinking in the production. In contemporary reception, however, the eschatological focus of the work is hard to adjust to the expectations of modern audiences. This paper discusses the solutions elaborated by the Russian stage director Dimitry Tcherniakov in his production for the National Opera in Amsterdam. Tcherniakov succeeded to manipulate the work into the direction of a social and psychological drama. This paper analyses the strategies he employed to arrive at such a significant change of meaning without violating its spiritual tone

Look back in wonder : how the endings of short stories can be their most powerful and effective distinguishing features

Drawing on her experiences as a writer and teacher of short fiction, the author offers an interrogation of the defining qualities of short stories, with a particular focus on how the ending of a narrative can be one of the most useful ways of teasing out generic differences between short fic-tion and other prose forms. A survey of critical and writerly opinion leads into a practical demon-stration of how endings work, with detailed reference to James Joyce’s Dubliners. The essay concludes by suggesting ways in which Dubliners prefigures the composite novels and story cy-cles that are prominent features of contemporary practice

Liquids shape up nicely

Decorating a surface with a forest of microposts can either make it repel water or cause it to be sucked into the spaces between posts. In the latter case, the shape of a liquid on the surface can be controlled using simple design principles

Natural Gravitino Dark Matter and Thermal Leptogenesis in Gauge-Mediated Supersymmetry Breaking Models

We point out that there is no cosmological gravitino problem in a certain class of gauge-mediated supersymmetry-breaking (GMSB) models. The constant term in the superpotential naturally causes small mixings between the standard-model and messenger fields, which give rise to late-time decays of the lightest messenger fields. This decay provides an exquisite amount of entropy, which dilutes the thermal relics of the gravitinos down to just the observed mass density of the dark matter. This remarkable phenomenon takes place naturally, irrespective of the gravitino mass and the reheating temperature of inflation, once the gravitinos and messenger fields are thermalized in the early Universe. In this class of GMSB models, there is no strict upper bound on the reheating temperature of inflation, which makes the standard thermal leptogenesis the most attractive candidate for the origin of the observed baryon asymmetry in the present Universe.Comment: estimation of dilution factor corrected, 1 figure adde

An Evening of Song Recital Series, February 28, 1995

This is the concert program of the An Evening of Song Recital Series performance on Tuesday, February 28, 1995 at 6:00 p.m., at the Boston University Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were Music for Awhile and If Music be the Food of Love by Henry Purcell, "Se Florindo è fedele" by Alessandro Scarletti, La Regata Veneziana by Gioacchino Rossini, Banalités by Francis Poulenc, Les Roses d'Ispahan, Op. 39, No. 4 by Gabriel Fauré, Mandoline by Claude Debussy, L'Heure exquise by Reynaldo Hahn, Liebe schwärmt auf allen Wegen by Franz Schubert, Dans un bois solitaire by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Oh, had I a Jubal's lyre, from Joshua by George Frideric Handel, Frühlingslaube by Franx Schubert, Strike the Viol and Man is for the Woman Made by Henry Purcell, Geheimnis, Das Mädchen spricht, and Wiegenlied by Johannes Brahms, and Songs About Spring by Dominic Argento. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund