The Chautauquan Daily

The good news is that Chautauqua Theater Company is staging Anton Chekhov’s 1901 “Three Sisters,” one of the greatest plays ever written, through July 17. Further, good reports can be made of the chosen translation: by the late Slavic academic-turned-actor Paul Schmidt, it renders Chekhov’s then-contemporary idiom (the play is set in a stultifying provincial city in 1900) into plausible, listenable and unstilted American English, with only a few questionable decisions.

Carolyn Byham is hopeful about the future of ballet. “I think people are getting more and more interested in dance,” she said.

At 4 p.m. today in the Hall of Christ, three Opera Company Studio Artists will present the latest in the weekly Artsongs recital series. This week, the songs will have a distinctly modern feel. All but two of them were written in the 20th century.

“The beauty of music is that it brings people together,” guest conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya said. “You have to become friends to make music together.” Harth-Bedoya was speaking about his friendship with cellist Alban Gerhardt. The two appear with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra at 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater.

Actors and instructors will be on the spot in front of audience members at today’s Brown Bag lunch as they work through Shakespearean text with no prior rehearsal. This week’s Brown Bag lunch, which begins at 12:15 p.m. today at Bratton Theater, will be led by Associate Artistic Director Andrew Borba and Peter Francis James.

David Ignatius, 30-year foreign affairs journalist and espionage novelist, will speak at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater as Week Three’s fourth speaker on “American Intelligence: Technology, Espionage and Alliances.”

Martha Dodd was a young, beautiful American living in Berlin in 1933. The daughter of the U.S. Ambassador, she cavorted in elite circles of German society and fell in love with top Nazi officials. Not until the first spasm of Hitler’s vicious executions did she turn against her suitors and become a Soviet spy.

In 1967, Stella Rimington had been in India for two years with her husband, diplomat John Rimington. She had dropped her career and had begun working as a housewife.

SLIDESHOW: Scenes from the Music School Festival Orchestra on Monday, July 11, 2011.

It’s always a welcome event to have the North Carolina Dance Theatre and the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra collaborate, but the first such program of the season appeared to have a third party involved — the audience.

At the end of Week Two, three Boys’ and Girls’ Club counselors were decorated with Club’s top honors: the “Counselors of the Week” award. Gabby Salva, 18, from Napa, Calif., Libby Goodell, 19, from Bronxville, N.Y., and Suzie Tuthill, 17, from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, took home the award last Friday.

If there are traits that the Rev. Tony Campolo embodies, they are enthusiasm, energy and joy in taking action, so I was surprised that he and his wife Peggy had moved into a retirement community. “Yes,” he said, “I did move into a retirement community, but you should not retire. I was with some UCLA students. They were so cynical. I said to them, ‘I am 76, and you are 23, and I am younger than you. You are as young as your dreams and old as your cynicism. I am still dreaming.”

A pianist could play “Claire de Lune” today, and Claude Debussy would never hear it. An orchestra could play the “New World Symphony” next weekend, and Antonin Dvořák could never tell them what it was like to see buffalos roaming the prairies. When a musician can collaborate with a composer, it is a rare opportunity to deconstruct the imagination of a creative mind that was compelled to create a work of art.

Perhaps no other “spy for God” is as well known as the subject of Geffrey Kelly’s lecture: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Kelly’s presentation, “The Costly Grace of Christian Discipleship in the Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” was the second installment in Week Three’s interfaith lecture series, “Spies for God.”

The walkway in front of Strohl Art Center has become a work of art in itself. Chautauquans Lowell and Rebecca Strohl felt the outside of the recently constructed art facility needed an extra touch to make it inviting to passersby. They collaborated with Judy Barie, director of galleries for Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution, and Mike Conroe, an architect from Buffalo, N.Y., to spice up the walkway.

Emma Morehart | Staff Writer Nearly a century before the Massey Memorial Organ’s birth, César Franck, Franz Liszt and Aristide Cavaillé-Coll formed a trinity of organ talent perfect for the Chautauqua Amphitheater’s prized possession. Although