Sumi Jo

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Sumi Jo

Sumi Jo is a Grammy award winning South Korean lyric coloratura soprano known for her interpretations of the bel canto repertoire.

She graduated from the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome after 3 years of study in keyboard and vocal music.

In 1986, she made her operatic debut as Gilda in Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto at Teatro Comunale Giuseppe Verdi in Trieste. This debut performance attracted the attention of Herbert von Karajan, for whom she sang the role of Oscar in Un Ballo in Maschera at the Salzburg Festival, as a result of an audition in 1988.

Since then, she has performed all the great coloratura roles such as the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute , the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor, Zerbinetta in Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, Fiorilla in Il turco in Italia, Amina in La sonnambula, etc. at the world’s major opera houses, under conductors like Sir Georg Solti, Zubin Mehta, Lorin Maazel, and Richard Bonynge.

Vocalise (OST The Ninth Gate)

*original post 2010

Caravaggio: The perfect ending to one of art's blackest tales *

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David and Goliath c. 1600 Oil on canvas, 110 x 91 cm Museo del Prado, Madrid

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jun/16/caravaggio-art-profile-death


I can think of no other painter who imagined death so acutely from the inside, as a physical reality, something happening to a real person - which makes the claim to have discovered his corpse and the cause of his death all the more compulsive news. Caravaggio dealt in death, metaphorically and very literally.

Caravaggio's own death became his theme: he gave his own features to the decapitated Goliath in one of his very last pictures.....