Instagram story viewer> @cocierlumos> Posts
ChristianO’s LitMusicFoodArtGram(@cocierlumos)'s profile avatar HD Profile

ChristianO’s LitMusicFoodArtGram

@cocierlumos

204
followers
561
following
Hardware Engineer at Apple, Materials Science PhD on Optical Materials and Components, University of Illinois Grad, Lover of Music, Opera, Literature
POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED
Sightseeing San Francisco with my grandmother and mother. by @cocierlumos
1
2 days ago
Download
Michael Katz’s new translation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot for Norton reads as one of the work’s most lucid and patently readable renditions in English, necessary to convey one of Dostoevsky’s most eclectic and structurally digressive novels. Unlike the widely circulated Pevear translation, which transliterates the author’s idiosyncratic Russian language repetitions, abrupt tonal shifts and syntactical awkwardness directly into a baggy, poorly coordinated English, Katz manages to render this text into fluid, legible prose while preserving the original’s combustible energy. This translation thus clarifies the work’s central themes: the obsession with the impossibility of innocence surviving a society steeped in vanity, desire, money, humiliation, and social performance. Myshkin’s destabilization of his milieu and his exposure of how pity can become possessive, love can become destructive, and compassion itself can fail when it cannot distinguish between saving another person and surrendering oneself to their suffering is depicted with astonishing clarity and nuance in Katz’s strung. The tragic implications, the dark and somber mood, and that teetering sense of dread of the book’s final fourth part is especially palpable in this edition. Katz’s deliberate crafting of the dialogue emerges as uniquely insightful and salient in the novel’s myriad social scenes, where confession, cruelty, theological argument, and self-abasement collide with theatrical violence, perhaps even an undercurrent of the comic and absurd that is lost in earlier translations. This translation manages to unify this unwieldy novel into a homogenous tapestry: a feverish, contradictory, grotesquely funny, and finally devastating novel that peers into one of Dostoevsky’s persistent preoccupations—whether genuine, radical goodness can exist in a world that repeatedly misreads, exploits, and destroys it. A pertinent novel whose psychological and moral force retains relevancy in a world increasingly divorced from the author’s own morally fractured period. by @cocierlumos
0
2 days ago
Download
Louisa Proske’s @louisaproske new production of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Metropolitan Opera may be one of the most coherent productions of an Italian opera I’ve experienced on the Met stage (my favorites being the Dexter and Hytner stagings of Don Carlo). The strengths of Proske’s conception are its well delineated direction of the opera’s main characters, imparting a Shakespearean dimension to the drama’s relational aspects. Proske’s direction specifically foregrounds the moral conflict experienced by the Macbeths, their gradual corruption and downfall portrayed with uncommon specificity by Kelsey and Davidsen. Her staging too adopts an elegant Elizabethan aesthetic without being arch, the costumes and manners conceived to cohere with the libretto’s origination. Jon Bausor’s craggy, quasi apocalyptic stage design acts as an emotionally appropriate substrate for the narrative’s scenic transitions—the Met’s turntable and his stagecraft effectively recreated the grandeur of the castle’s banquet hall, the shadowy dread within the main couple’s chambers, and the various locales of this desolate reimagining of Scotland. Musically, I was impressed to by the Met’s lineup of vocalists. Lise Davidsen demonstrated considerable depth in her extraordinarily sung Lady Macbeth—more Vanessa Redgrave in her inwardness than a stock melodramatic Italian soprano. I adored her sleepwalking scene and her Brindisi, and her opening cabaletta was garlanded with the appropriate ornamentation to showcase her coruscating instrument’s dazzling versatility. Quinn Kelsey @therealquinnkelsey brought substantial tragic dimension and intelligence to his antihero, his Pieta rispetto amore a crowning exhibit of his prodigious vocal and thespian gifts. Freddie de Tommaso cut through the ensembles with a handsome heroic tenor as Macduff, his rich Italianate tone recalling the expressive patina of an earlier vintage. The Met chorus enveloped the score’s myriad choral scenes with musicality and an impressive wall of sound. Nezet Seguin’s reading worked best in the exhilarating tutti’s, but sometimes showed unusual tempo choices and missed the orchestration’s bewitching cantilenas. taken in The Metropolitan Opera by @cocierlumos
0
8 days ago
Download
SFMOMA’s Matisse’s Femme au Chapeau: A Modern Scandal builds an exhibition around a controversial painting that retains its ability to provoke for its myriad visual tensions. Matisse’s portrait of his wife Amélie is painted with incongruent collisions of seasick greens, acid reds, magentas, teals, apricots, and other chromatically aberrant improbabilities colliding across her face and clothing. Witnessing La Femme au Chapeau alongside chronologically and stylistically adjacent works was insightful for canonizing its aesthetic incongruities as part of history’s continuum: its colors do not simply harmonize through complementary opposition; its brushwork can be nervous and inconsistent; its forms refuse the easy decorative pleasures associated with Matisse’s more serenely sensuous works. And therein lies Its importance as a work of art: its visual friction, the endurance of its ugliness, and its refusal to settle into elegance or coherence despite the familiarity and intimacy of its subject. taken in SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art by @cocierlumos
1
8 days ago
Download
For years, I’ve been captivated by Anne Carson’s linguistically febrile translations of the great Greek plays. Her “An Oresteia” on FSG @fsgbooks is a magnificent creation that threads her poetic insights through critical events that shape the fall of the House of Atreus, especially her landmark rendition of Sophocles’ Elektra. Her Euripides translations for NYRB (Hekabe!) thrum with dramatic fervor. Equally compelling are her rendering of Sappho’s surviving verse into English and her own highly individual experiments in poetry and long form essays. I was thus gratified to learn of the Swedish Academy’s recognition of her innovations in contemporary writing and her dramatically compelling revitalizations of the classics. Carson makes these works’s theatricality bristle with a sharpness and sensuality sometimes absent in some more clinical translations, their strange and antique expressive forms clarified by her linguistic precision. Later this year, I’ll be seeing Daniel Fish and the Theatre for a New Audience’s @theatreforanewa production of Sophocles’ Elektra using her translation. Congratulations to a magnificent artist and one of my favorite classicists on this richly deserved recognition. by @cocierlumos
0
9 days ago
Download
Mozart’s Così fan tutte is arguably the most sophisticated—dramatically and musically—and morally challenging of his three collaborations with Lorenzo Da Ponte. Outwardly a comedy, this chamber drama requires performers of uncommon subtlety: singers who can sustain its marvelous succession of arias and ensembles while dispatching its nuanced recitatives with quicksilver precision. Così is ultimately bittersweet. Beneath Alfonso’s cruel experiment runs an undercurrent of melancholy, exposing how lovers idealize one another and how what they understand as love may remain veiled in illusion until placed under duress. Phelim McDermott’s cacophonous, Coney Island–inspired production, populated by a delightful company of carnies, often favors the work’s comic exterior. At times—especially during the overture—the abundance of antics threatens to overwhelm the music’s sublimity. Unfortunately, the staging fails to make light of the tragicomedy and the disturbing questions that surface in the bleaker second act. Fortunately, a cast of this stature foregrounded the libretto’s deeper relational tensions. Federica Lombardi sang Fiordiligi with voluptuous tone and sensitivity to the Italianate line; her “Come scoglio,” a roller coaster of an aria, displayed grounded musicianship, while “Per pietà, ben mio, perdona” proved deeply moving. Samantha Hankey brought refulgent tone and commanding presence to Dorabella; together, the pair were the evening’s vocal standouts. Duke Kim approached Ferrando’s music with dulcet elegance, at moments recalling Alfredo Kraus’s celebrated interpretation on recording. Andrey Zhilikhovsky lent Guglielmo comedy and swagger. Most incisive were Ana María Martínez and Gerald Finley as the worldly, jaundiced Despina and Alfonso, both commanding Mozart’s recitatives with authority. Nimrod David Pfeffer led an exquisitely shaped account of the score, giving the instrumental writing buoyancy and momentum. taken in The Metropolitan Opera by @cocierlumos
1
21 days ago
Download
I walked into Sam Pinkleton’s The Rocky Horror Show at Studio 54 as an initiate into one of American culture’s iconic camp traditions (never experienced the midnight screenings or the callbacks), and found the whole experience to be a mindfuck in the best possible way. Pinkleton embraces the show’s disreputable B-horror-movie aesthetic—transforming Studio 54 into a fluorescent laboratory of artifice, glam-rock grit, and sexual anarchy. His cast also commits to the madness with unhinged abandon. Amber Gray is a wonderfully sinister, magnetic Riff Raff; Kevin McHale gives Brad an irresistible mixture of innocence, panic, and liberation; and Jake Shears makes Frank-N-Furter dangerous and extravagantly alive. RIP Tim Curry, whose audacity created something enduring for pop culture—loved the memorial created for him outside the auditorium. @studio54.nyc @roundaboutnyc taken in Roundabout Theater at Studio 54 by @cocierlumos
0
21 days ago
Download
I’ve witnessed many of the operatic canon’s masterpieces and rarities over twenty years of supporting the art form, but only saw Puccini’s La Boheme for the first time this past weekend. The Metropolitan Opera’s @metopera longstanding Franco Zeffirelli production, with its maximalist and literalist recreation of that Parisian milieu, set something of a standard for how a traditional La Boheme can recreate the story. It’s a little unimaginative and overstuffed across the Met’s cavernous space, but many of its elements—the Where’s Waldo-esque setting of Cafe Momus, the stage animals, the snowy, filmic presentation of the third act—remain crowd pleasers and are ultimately neutral to the narrative. My cast was excellent—Freddie de Tommaso @freddiedetommaso wields a heroic, ardent and darkly tinted romantic Italian tenor that wraps itself around Rodolfo’s music with the an old fashioned heroism. Juliana Grigoryan’s @juliana__grigoryan voice blooms with a youthful beauty and a fragility that complements Mimi’s character, and Rosa Feola @rosa_feola is luxury casting as Musetta. Hansung Yoo @hansungyoo and Le Bu @leee_buuu were equally sonorous as Marcello and Colline. I took issues with Ramon Tebar’s occasional miscoordination of the orchestra with the singers, but it was a largely satisfying evening owing to the strengths of the principals. The highlights for me were the latter two acts—the third for how sympathetically de Tommaso and Grigoryan reenacted the tensions of young love, the final for the heartbreak the ensemble found in Mimi’s tragic death. Most Bohemes tend to be organized as routine revivals, but this cast embodied their characters vocally and theatrically. taken in The Metropolitan Opera by @cocierlumos
0
21 days ago
Download
Highlights from the Whitney Museum @whitneymuseum, a favorite gem showcasing contemporary American art in the lower west side. Always a delight to see new ideas take form in the biennial exhibit, found much that was aesthetically interesting in Minnie Evans’ mandala like expressions of spirituality, in geometrically stark contours of Roy Lichtenstein’s pop art. As always I love the magnificent paintings (the layered O’Keefe’s, the melancholy Hoppers, the Jasper Johns) in the museum’s permanent collection. taken in Whitney Museum of American Art by @cocierlumos
0
21 days ago
Download
Marc Chagall’s Le Triomphe de la Musique, the magnificent mural of crimson threaded with imagery and creatures of Jewish spirituality borrowed from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and the Bible . @laurencemeiklebass taken in The Metropolitan Opera by @cocierlumos
0
22 days ago
Download
Rewatched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey finally in the Metreon’s spectacular 70mm IMAX; indeed, the movie is most persuasive when it gives itself over to spectacle. The grandeur of the Mediterranean world, the strangeness of its monsters, and the chiaroscuro of its locales evoke a grandeur worthy of the story’s mythological stature, and I admired the parallels Nolan draws (sometimes rather heavily) between Mycenaean Greece and the imperial self-mythologies of modern America. Yet for all its cinematographic marvels, I found the screenplay disappointingly thin. Homer’s characters are among the most psychologically rich in Western literature, capable of tenderness, duplicity, vanity, cruelty, and self-invention; Nolan reduces them to stock American hero gestures and stultified dialogue. Returning to Daniel Mendelsohn’s @danielmendelsohn1960 remarkable translation further enhanced my sense of what experiencing Homer gains from the poetry. Mendelsohn’s achievement lies not simply in fidelity of meaning and meter, but also of texture: his acute sensitivity to the musicality, diction, and the peculiar tonal qualities of Homeric Greek. By preserving the dactylic hexameter line in English, he allows the lines to unfurl with a languidity that recalls the hypnotic qualities of the Ancient Greek. I often return to his outstanding treatment of Book 11, where the descent into the realm of Tiresias acquires a solemn gravity I haven’t encountered in other major translations. Odysseus’ encounters with the shades are haunted by death yet celebratory of life, each conversation highlighting the preciousness of the mortal world through memory, longing, unfinished love, and the awareness of its transience. Mendelsohn also makes Odysseus’ return to Ithaca feel like a deeply earned journey toward self-recognition, withholding revelation as carefully as Homer withholds identity. Disguise, testing, memory, and recognition accumulate until the wanderer gradually finally inhabits his fragmented self. Of the many Odysseys I have read, this is the one in which I vividly experience the ancient poem’s monumental and intimate qualities. by @cocierlumos
0
25 days ago
Download
There is something startlingly coherent about Claus Guth’s psychological framing of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, a production whose visual language psychologically deepens this notoriously labyrinthine drama. Guth begins at the opera’s end, with the dying Doge reflecting on a life shaped by political ambition, private grief, lost love, and belated reconciliation. What follows unfolds as an extended act of memory: figures drift through Christian Schmidt’s cavernous frame like apparitions, actions are repeated or observed at the canvas that intermittently peers into the past, and Simon’s own history appears refracted into his present. The great descending meteor becomes an increasingly ominous presence as the evening progresses—the weight of office, regret, mortality, and time itself bearing upon a complex figure who has spent decades trying to reconcile his familial and civic responsibilities. Particularly moving is Guth’s collapse of Simon the statesman into Simon the grieving father; amid the political machinery of Genoa, the reunion with Amelia becomes the opera’s emotional locus, illuminating the rich emotionality incipient to Verdi’s work and characters. Amartuvshin Enkhbat’s @amartuvshinenkhbat extraordinary Verdi baritone anchors the evening, his dark, Italianate plushness and effortless amplitude matched by an unusual inwardness with his interpretation. His council chamber scene is a remarkable demonstration of authority and prowess. Eleonora Buratto @eleonora_buratto brings a gleaming, flickering Italianate soprano to Amelia (what Freni like undertones) and their recognition scene is among the evening’s most affecting passages. Christian Van Horn @vanhorncvh gives Fiesco patrician severity and weight, while Joshua Guerrero’s @iamjoshuaguerrero bright, ardent Gabriele provides contrast and brightness amid the darker vocal patina. Eun Sun Kim @eskconductor leads the score with flexibility and attention to color, allowing Verdi’s great paragraphs to expand and scintillate while observing the score’s flowing dramatic architecture. @sfopera taken in San Francisco Opera by @cocierlumos
1
25 days ago
Download

Download All

Save the photos and videos currently loaded on this page.

0Photos
0Videos
Ready to download 0 / 0

Keep this tab open until your download is ready.
back to up