2011 Week Three

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.

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.

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

“I am the Pablo bird, bird of a single feather, I fly in the clear shadows and the confused light.” These are the words of Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. A writer with a strong political opinion, Neruda was originally Neftalí Reyes but changed his name to save his father the embarrassment of having a poet for a son.

Many consider a week at the Chautauqua Institution a vacation, a chance for relaxation. For some, this comes in the form of engaging in social dialogue or listening to lectures; for others, it means watching the waves of Chautauqua Lake lap against grass and sand. For Alexander Gavrylyuk, a visit to Chautauqua assumes no less than performing in front of thousands of spectators hanging on every whim of his keyboard.

Stella Rimington is former Director General of the British civilian intelligence agency MI5, but don’t call her James Bond. Rimington, who will deliver the 10:45 a.m. lecture today in the Amphitheater, became the first female head of a British intelligence agency when she took the post in 1992. She started working for the agency in 1965 as a part-time clerk and typist and worked her way up through the ranks, serving in the main fields of MI5’s responsibilities — counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism.

The Rev. Frank Chikane has been tortured, detained, put under house arrest, suspended from his ministry, criticized and nearly killed because of his fight for equality in South Africa. But he doesn’t name any of those when speaking about the biggest challenge he has faced so far. “The challenge was I had to accept that Christians can do horrible things,” Chikane. “That’s why you will hear me talking about it (in the lecture), that I’m scared of religion. I’m scared of it. Because people can kill you in the name of God and believe in it.”

When the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell calls the afternoon Interfaith lecturer “one of the best lecturers of our time,” you had better pay attention. The aforementioned lecturer was Gary Dorrien, Episcopal priest, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion at Columbia University. Dorrien has published a dozen books and more than 100 articles.

SLIDESHOW: Scenes during the Firemen's Picnic on Sunday, July 10, 2011.