The Wallis Will Host 2025-26 Scott Dunn Orchestra Season Concerts

The Scott Dunn Orchestra (SDO) has its inaugural concert at the Bram Goldsmith Theater at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday, May 22,2025 at 7:30 pm, “Henry Mancini at 100 – A Celebration of the Man and His Music.” 

This is the first in a series of four concerts that give a curated  tour through the first three golden ages of Hollywood film music -- a large scale retrospective of this key art form in the eras that defined the role and place of music as a part of dramatic storytelling, in Hollywood and international filmmaking. 

The series begins on May 22, 2025 with a concert that traces the career of Henry Mancini, one of the most popular, important and enduring film composers – a master of dramatic scoring and a composer of themes that became among the most popular and enduring songs of the 20th century.

Scott Dunn who conducts and curates the series is a noted advocate for American contemporary film music.  He has had a remarkable career as a 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.  The Scott Dunn Orchestra is the brainchild of Dunn and global music executive and producer Gill Graham and, in partnership with The Wallis, they have created  an orchestra with many of the finest studio musicians, dedicated solely to presenting film music.

"Henry Mancini at 100” highlights 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 illustrates how his big-band background influenced his work and, in his early work, created a new style of scoring that transformed it by incorporating 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, which were arrangements made for their vinyl releases, not the music heard in the actual films.  Creating new arrangements from original materials, Dunn aims to show Mancini's depth and range, with a program that  also includes dramatic scoring from “Two for the Road”, “Days Of Wine And Roses,” and “Soldier In The Rain,” as well as themes from “Charade,” “Hatari!,” “Lujon,” new suites from “Breakfast at Tiffany's,” “The Pink Panther,” “Peter Gunn,” and the finale of “Victor/Victoria.” Guest singers from TONALITY will perform choral sections in the new arrangements for “Days of Wine and Roses”, “The Pink Panther,” and “Breakfast at Tiffany's,” and will recreate a characteristic Mancini sound that is rarely, if ever, heard live.

Following the Mancini concert, the inaugural season continues with three concerts celebrating the three golden eras of film scoring. 

The first is dedicated to the “Hollywood Modernists” – thought of as the Second Golden Age of Film Scoring  (November 22, 2025) with music from the fifties and sixties - and  features music arranged by Dunn  from such iconic films as “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 a new arrangement of “Song After Sundown” from “Too Late Blues,” originally scored for jazz saxophonist Stan Getz and the Boston Pops by David Raksin.

Leonard Rosenman, who was a close friend and mentor to Dunn 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. This concert presents the work of Rosenman and his cohort of composers who were nearly all students of Schoenberg and/or Copland: Alex North, Bernard Herrmann, David Raksin, Leonard Bernstein, and Elmer Bernstein.

The next concert, “Monsters, Murders, Spies and Space” from Hollywood's Third Golden Age (January 17, 2026) takes audiences on a deep dive into the iconic films of the ‘70s, such as “Star Wars,” “The Godfather (I and II),” “Chinatown,” “The Sting,” “Diamonds are Forever,” “Taxi Driver,” and “Murder on the Orient Express.” The evening features music by Jerry Goldsmith, Michel Legrand, Marvin Hamlisch, David Shire, Richard Rodney Bennett, John Barry, Nino Rota, and John Williams.

In the final concert of the series “From Hell to Hollywood” (May 30, 2026), Scott Dunn and his orchestra explore the music and influence on Hollywood of European émigré composers forced in the 1930s to flee from the Nazis. This concert features music by Max Steiner (director of film scores for RKO and later Warner Bros), Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman, Friedrich Hollaender, Dmitri Tiomkin, Bronislau Kaper, Hanns Eisler, Erich Zeisl and others, from such films as “Gone with the Wind,” “King Kong,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Rear Window,” “High Noon,” “Sabrina,” “Mutiny on the Bounty,” and others. Dunn's program also considers the influence of Arnold Schoenberg (and the Schoenberg family) on an entire generation of film composers, including David Raksin and Leonard Rosenman. 

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 here in the center of the film industry, now have one as well.”

“If Scott didn't exist, he would have to be invented.  His skillful and expert knowledge of film music, (in fact, any music in any genre) is something to be truly celebrated. Sir Richard Rodney Bennett introduced him to me as “one of the finest and most sophisticated musicians alive” -he wasn't wrong.  I look forward to this unique partnership with Scott, SDO and the Wallis,” said Gill Graham, Executive Producer, SDO.

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