Saturday, October 30, 2021, 7:30 PM

Street and Davis Performance Hall, Anne and Ellen Fife Theatre

THIS EVENT HAS ALREADY OCCURRED

"Pink Martini is a rollicking around-the-world musical adventure…if the United Nations had a house band in 1962, hopefully we’d be that band."

–Thomas Lauderdale, Pink Martini bandleader/pianist

PROGRAM NOTEs

View the program for this event here.

Pink Martini is inspired by the romantic Hollywood musicals of the 1940s and '50s. The ensemble’s arrangements of Latin music, cabaret, and cinema scores come together in a sound that defies categorization and is guaranteed to get the audience up and dancing in the aisles. Performing with singer China Forbes, Pink Martini takes the audience on a musical trip around the world, from a samba parade in Rio to a French nightclub.

This marks Pink Martini's debut on a Blacksburg stage, although Pink Martini bandleader/pianist and founder Thomas Lauderdale and Forbes streamed a full-throated cabaret evening of music and conversation in the Moss Arts Center’s fall HomeStage series that audience members are still talking about.

In the foreground, Thomas Lauderdale of Pink Martini, standing and holding a vintage camera, and China Forbes of Pink Martini, seated on and near vintage suitcases and holding a navy blue umbrella, while others float in a hot air balloon in the background
The members of Pink Martini pose in black formal wear, and China Forbes poses on a grey settee in a red ball gown.
The members of Pink Martini pose on the concrete patio steps of a grand house. The men wear black suits, bandleader Thomas Lauderdale wears a grey suit, and soloist China Forbes wears a flowing, floor length hot pink ballgown.
Thomas Lauderdale and China Forbes of Pink Martini on an olive green love seat in front of a large house. Lauderdale, an Asian man with bleached blonde hair and black framed glasses, wears a grey suit and black bowtie. Forbes, a white woman with green eyes and medium length dark brown hair, wears a hot pink ballgown and pink lipstick.
China Forbes of Pink Martini in a forest green dress, holding a navy blue umbrella near a white retro suitcase with a rainbow colored deflated hot air balloon in the background
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In 1994 in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, Lauderdale was working in politics, thinking that one day he would run for mayor. Like other eager politicians-in-training, he went to every political fundraiser under the sun, but was dismayed to find the music at these events underwhelming, lackluster, loud, and un-neighborly. Drawing inspiration from music from all over the world—crossing genres of classical, jazz and old-fashioned pop—he founded the "little orchestra" Pink Martini in 1994. One year later, Lauderdale called China Forbes, a Harvard classmate who was living in New York City, and asked her to join Pink Martini.

Lauderdale and Forbes began to write songs together. Their first song, Sympathique (Je neveux pas travailler), became an overnight sensation in France, nominated for "Song of the Year" at France's Victoires de la Musique Awards and to this day remains a mantra (Je ne veux pas travailler means "I don't want to work") for striking French workers.

Featuring a dozen musicians with songs in 25 languages, Pink Martini performs its multilingual repertoire on concert stages and with symphony orchestras throughout Europe, Asia, Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, Northern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, South America, and North America. Pink Martini made its European debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 and its orchestral debut with the Oregon Symphony in 1998 under the direction of Norman Leyden. Since then, the band has gone on to play with more than 50 orchestras around the world, including multiple engagements with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the Boston Pops, the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center, the San Francisco Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the BBC Concert Orchestra at Royal Albert Hall in London.

In 2014 Pink Martini was inducted into both the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame and the Oregon Music Hall of Fame. The ensemble has released 11 studio albums on its own independent label Heinz Records (named after Lauderdale’s dog), selling over 3 million albums worldwide.

This performance is supported in part by gifts from Ms. Constance Cedras, Mrs. Candi M. Kelly and Dr. J. Michael Kelly, and Dr. Charles Y. Davis and Mrs. Carole C. Davis.