Under Daniel Sullivan's first-rate direction, however, the production is a welcome reminder of the appeal of its author's gliding dialogue and structural elegance, as well as of the troubled, rueful heart that informs all of Mr. Gurney's work.

The framing device of having the whole story remembered in flashback by a 101-year-old survivor gives it a structural elegance that most Hollywood epics don't even dream of.

In particular, Mr. Calatrava's Alamillo Bridge in Spain, while visually striking, displays a regrettable absence of engineering economy and structural elegance.

In "Saturday," McEwan's new novel, these characteristic virtues of structural elegance and coherence are on prominent display - not least in the Aristotelian discipline with which he has confined the temporal span of his story to a single day.

His approach was direct, his vision clear, and his paintings full of structural elegance, with the results a positive and optimistic expression.

Ellis Kohs, a composer known for works in which contemporary harmonic ideas were combined with the structural elegance of Classical forms, died at a nursing home in Los Angeles on May 17.

Nuanced perspective, structural elegance and imaginative scope are sometimes sacrificed to immediacy and polemics.

Taking the Fort William railway line up the west side of Scotland, walking across some of the most remote and majestic mountains in Britain, then coming back on the eastern Inverness line already has an obvious structural elegance.

"He combines light and air and structural elegance with strength."

The trick is to evoke that spirit without sacrificing the elegance, both structural and superficial, that has always been an inviolable Mozartean hallmark.