Anne's Arts & Activities Blog

March 2019   |  2019 Season   |  Accommodations   |  Plan a Visit   |  Make a Donation #CHQ2019 announcements: Judy Collins and Madeleine Peyroux on Opening Night, Dawes on Aug. 16, plus free Sunday entertainment We're thrilled to confirm our Opening Night acts, as the iconic Judy Collins and acclaimed jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux share a double-billing — a stirring start for our 2019 season — while popular folk band Dawes is confirmed to join us on Aug. 16. Read on for more information on these and other exciting additions to our concert lineup. ...

2019 Composer-in-Residence We’re thrilled to announce that Gilda Lyons will join Chautauqua Opera this summer as our fourth Composer-in-Residence! GILDA LYONS , composer, vocalist and visual artist, combines elements of renaissance, neo-baroque, spectral, folk, agitprop music theater and extended vocalism to create works of uncompromising emotional honesty and melodic beauty. An active vocalist and fierce advocate of contemporary music, Lyons has commissioned, premiered and workshopped new vocal works by dozens of composers. Lyons serves as co-chair of the Composition Program at Wintergreen Summer Music Academy in Virginia, and as visiting assistant professor of composition at The Hartt School in Connecticut. She is artistic and executive director of The Phoenix Concerts , New York's "intrepid Upper West Side new-music series" ( The New Yorke...

Following Diana Ross' stunning performance on Sunday's Grammy Awards broadcast , we're thrilled to announce that the Motown legend will appear on the Amphitheater stage on July 5, to cap our Fourth of July celebration during Week Two. Also in Week Two, favorite Chautauqua collaborator James Fallows joins us to host a series of Interfaith Lecture Series conversations featuring "Common Good Change Agents." Diana Ross Friday, July 5 8:15 p.m. · Amphitheater Tickets available Feb. 14 $80–205 Preferred seating available Details National treasure Diana Ross is known as one of the world’s greatest entertainers of all time. She has been inducted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and is the recipient of a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. A legendary performer of the Moto...

Chautauqua Institution is delighted to announce The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir (Flatiron Books), by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, as the 2018 winner of The Chautauqua Prize. As author of the winning book, Marzano-Lesnevich receives $7,500 and all travel and expenses for a summer residency at Chautauqua from Aug. 1 to 6, 2018. A public reading will take place at 3:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 3, in the Hall of Philosophy on the Institution’s grounds. Marzano-Lesnevich said she was honored to receive The Chautauqua Prize, and “that the award comes from an institution with such a long history of creating space for rigorous, rewarding interdisciplinary and cross-genre dialogue makes it particularly meaningful at this moment in our national history, with our urgent need for socially engaged art.” “I very much look forward to attending the Institution this summer, and to all the rich conversations that will unfold there,” Marzano-Lesnevich said. Chautauqua Institution ...

Amor Towles A Gentleman in Moscow 3:30 p.m. Thursday, July 19, 2018 — Hall of Philosophy, Chautauqua, NY A transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel, A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in an elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery. Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates Count Rostov...

Chautauqua Institution today announced the establishment of a new literary prize. The Chautauqua Janus Prize will be awarded for the first time in 2018, celebrating an emerging writer’s single work of short fiction or nonfiction for daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder readers’ imaginations, historical narratives, and literary conventions. In addition to receiving a $2,500 award, the winner will give a lecture on the grounds during the summer season and appear in a forthcoming issue of the literary journal Chautauqua. The prize is funded by a generous donation from Chautauquans Barbara and Twig Branch. Named for Janus, the Roman god who looks to both the past and the future, the prize will honor writing with a command of craft that renovates understandings of both. The 2018 winner will be selected by guest judge Kazim Ali, author of a forthcoming book of poems, Inquisition, and a forthcoming hybrid memoir, Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies. An as...

The two men accused of killing a concert violinist during a robbery in her Westfield summer home have been ordered held without bail after a prosecutor detailed how the victim was shot and stabbed after opening her door to help them. Jonathan Conklin and Charles Sanford said nothing during a detention hearing today in federal court in Buffalo, where they've pleaded not guilty to stealing property and taking it across state lines, as well as carjacking. Police say they killed 61-year-old Mary Whitaker after she agreed to lend them her phone after they told her they had run out of gas. They're accused of driving her car to Erie, where they were arrested after surveillance video showed them using her credit cards. A grand jury will consider state murder charges. Whitaker performed with the Chautauqua Symphony and Westchester Philharmonic. The news leader of the Twin Tiers ... since 1947