2011 Week Three

The band is cosmopolitan, but that’s not why it’s called Pink Martini. This “little orchestra” founded by politician-turned-musician Thomas Lauderdale in 1994 is difficult to categorize. Each of its six albums span a world of musical cultures, from Brazilian lounge music to Parisian jazz, and represent just as many languages.

Filmmaker Bestor Cram is no stranger to Chautauqua. “I consider myself the George Washington of Chautauqua,” Cram said, “because I’ve slept in almost every house here given the number of years that I’ve come here.”

Writer-in-residence Ron MacLean has high hopes for art. It can open the imagination, expand our feelings and even make us better people, he said.

There are times these days when I really miss the Soviets. I don’t miss their Gulag, or their massive military occupation of Eastern Europe, or many other aspects of their totalitarian and highly oppressive system. But I miss having them as our central enemy.

From makeshift jail cells across the U.S., Al Staggs brings to life the letter that a distraught Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his German prison in the early 1940s. “We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled — in short, from the perspective of those who suffer,” the letter states.

When David Ignatius was trying to get his first novel, Agents of Innocence, published, he found himself rejected by a dozen companies. The book started as nonfiction, but it became fictionalized as he wrote. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., finally approved the novel, but only on the basis that they wanted a nonfiction book next.

SLIDESHOW: Scenes of The North Carolina Dance Theatre in Residence performance with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra.

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.

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.”