The Wallis Presents The Scott Dunn Orchestra's Inaugural Concert THE HOLLYWOOD MODERNISTS - THE SECOND GOLDEN AGE OF FILM SCORING

The Scott Dunn Orchestra has its inaugural concert The Hollywood Modernists - the Second Golden Age of Film Scoring on Saturday, January 18, 2025 at 7:30pm at the Bram Goldsmith Theater at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. 

This new ensemble, partnering with The Wallis creates an orchestra with the many of the finest studio musicians, dedicated solely to presenting concerts of film music

The program celebrates American and European fifties and sixties film modernist composers that include Bernard Herrmann, Elmer Bernstein, Alex North, Jerry Goldsmith and Leonard Rosenman with music from iconic films including  A Streetcar Named Desire, East of Eden, To Kill A Mockingbird, Rebel Without a Cause, and North By Northwest. as well as the jazz saturated score for A Streetcar Named Desire and the world premiere of David Raksin's Song After Sundown from Too Late Blues, originally scored for jazz saxophonist Stan Getz and the Boston Pops.

The Hollywood Modernists will be followed by a second concert on Thursday, May 22 -- Henry Mancini at 100 a celebration of the Man and his Music.  Highlighting Mancini's early background as pianist and arranger for the Glenn Miller/Tex Beneke Band and then as staff composer at Universal Pictures, the program will show how his big-band background influenced his work and introduced in his early work a new style of scoring that were full-fledged jazz numbers including from Touch Of Evil, Peter Gunn, Mr. Lucky, The Pink Panther and Breakfast At Tiffany's.

What the public came to know as Mancini's film music came from his hit songs and commercial recordings, that were arrangements made for the vinyl releases, not the music heard in the actual films.  With an aim to show Mancini's depth and range, the program includes dramatic scoring from Days Of Wine And Roses, Wait Until Dark, Hatari!, Soldier In The Rain, and Charade as well as his popular songs from Two For The Road, Victor/Victoria, Moment To Moment and others. 

A noted advocate for American contemporary and film music, Scott Dunn has had a remarkable career as pianist, conductor and orchestrator. Since 2012, he has been the Associate Conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and regularly appears with major orchestras and headliners throughout the US, UK and Europe.

Dunn said, “I've long been in love with film music and I've had the great personal fortune to know such luminaries as Leonard Rosenman, Richard Rodney Bennett, David Raksin, Elmer Bernstein, as well as such distinguished contemporary film composers as Rachel Portman and Danny Elfman.  The music they produced has never been surpassed and is well worth presenting as absolute music -- many are as great as any orchestral works written in our century.  All of this we can remedy in concert and shed light on the music of the many these great, and highly trained composers.”

Robert van Leer, Wallis Executive Director and CEO said, “Many major cities have dedicated film music orchestras.  With the Scott Dunn Orchestra, with the incredible film music legacy as repertoire, we in the center of the film industry now have one as well.”

The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd, Beverly Hills. To purchase single tickets, subscriptions and for more information, please call 310-746-4000 (Monday – Friday, 10 am to 6 pm) or visit TheWallis.org.

Dunn's range as a conductor will be evident in The Hollywood Modernists and two other adjacent area concerts: on January 10, Dunn conducts the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall to accompany singer, songwriter, composer, producer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist Grammy nominee Cody Fry, known for his orchestral pop including his #1 Billboard Classical Hit “I Hear a Symphony” and the Grammy nominated for his re-orchestration of The Beatles' “Eleanor Rigby.”

Dunn also serves as music director for the Parnassus Society Orchestra which regularly presents opera in concert at the Soka Performing Arts Center. On January 25, Dunn conducts a program of Mahler, Brahms and Richard Rodney Bennett's Partita featuring Kayleigh Decker (Mezzo-Soprano) & Shunta Morimoto (Piano).

Background  Scott Dunn and the Scott Dunn Orchestra

Over Scott Dunn's two decades as Associate Conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl and at Walt Disney Concert Hall, he has participated in concert presentations of some of Hollywood's music  by such distinguished current composers as Alexandre Desplats, Danny Elfman, George Fenton, Michael Giocchino, Ludwig Göransson, Randy Newman, Thomas Newman, Rachel Portman, Alan Silvestri, Howard Shore, John Williams, and Hans Zimmer, as well the music of the Hollywood's Modernists including Harold Arlen, Aaron Copland, Hugo Friedhofer, Alfred Newman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Miklos Rosza, Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, and Leonard Rosenman, who was a  mentor to Dunn.

Dunn's passion for film music can be traced to Rosenman and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett. With the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, Dunn participated in the rise of live orchestra to film presentations in concert including adapting Rosenman's landmark 1955 score for Rebel Without a Cause for its 2016 premiere with the LA Phil in Disney Hall.

Among Rosenman's earliest work as for James Dean movies East of Eden (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Rosenman had met Dean at a party for the cast of a Broadway play, and introduced him to director Elia Kazan.

Rosenman was one of a generation of skilled New York concert composers who introduced modernism, American and European, and jazz into the language of film scoring which has never been the same since. Over a four decade career Rosenman scored over 130 films including winning two Academy Awards for Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975), and Bound for Glory (1976), a biographical film about Woody Guthrie. 

Rosenman's cohort of composers were nearly all students of Schoenberg and/or Copland and included the composers highlighted in this concert: Alex North, Bernard Herrmann, David Raksin, Leonard Bernstein and Elmer Bernstein.

Rosenman who was hugely influential to Dunn, who studied informally with him.  “It was largely due to his influence that I decided to pursue a life in music. (I had detoured from music into medicine when we first met).” 

Dunn said, “For audiences during the past two decades, live-orchestra-to-film programs developed to a collective experience for the films themselves and an event for fans of the film.  However, our impetus for the new Scott Dunn Orchestra (SDO) is a wanting to return to put the spotlight on the music and the composers whose music passes unnoticed as underscoring. We can also shed light on those who are not the most known names, but are in actuality concert composers who work in film.

Born and raised in Iowa, Dunn studied piano with the legendary pianist Byron Janis and is a former assistant to composer Lukas Foss – whose complete solo piano works Dunn recorded (Naxos, 2007).  Early in his career Dunn toured Eastern Europe for the USIA and introduced to those audiences many twentieth century American works including Ives' Concord Sonata

More recently Dunn adapted and performed his own arrangements of Julius Eastman's Gay Guerilla (2018) for four pianos and Duke Ellington's New World a-Comin' for solo piano and chamber jazz ensemble (2019).  Next season, Dunn will premiere a new rhapsody for piano and orchestra commissioned from composer Joby Talbot.

Scott's first collaboration with The Wallis was the launch of his album I Watch You Sleep orchestrated and conducted by Dunn and gorgeously sung by Claire Martin.  A highly personal tribute created by Dunn and Martin celebrating Sir Richard Rodney Bennett through Scott's own arrangements of their friend Bennett's songs and Bennett's favorites from the American songbook.

Dunn's interest in film and theatre music can also be traced to his long friendship with Bennett. Through Bennett, Dunn discovered the concert works of song-writer and composer Vernon Duke (a.k.a. Vladimir Dukelsky) whose ‘lost' piano concerto written for Arthur Rubinstein Dunn orchestrated and premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1999.  In 2007 he recorded the piano concerto with other Duke works with the Russian Philharmonic (Naxos, 2007).

In 2012 he edited the Vernon Duke Songbook for Hal Leonard and in 2013 he reconstructed Duke's oratorio The End of St. Petersburg for performance in St. Petersburg Russia. Other Duke recordings include violin concerto and complete works for violin with Elmira Darvarova (Urlicht 2015) and a ‘new' Duke musical MISIA (PS Classics, 2015) arranged and adapted by Dunn with orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick and a brilliant cast headed by Marin Mazzie.

Dunn's work with contemporary film composers, includes Rachel Portman, for whom he conducted the BBC Philharmonic in Mimi And The Mountain Dragon (Decca, 2019) for world-wide annual Christmas BBC broadcasts; with Lior Rosner for whom he recorded Sugar Plum On the Run with the Royal Philharmonic and Jeremy Irons (Sony, 2019) and with Danny Elfman, for whom he worked on Danny Elfman's Music From The Films of Tim Burton and has conducted around the world – as well as work on other Elfman concert works.

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