Scott Dunn Orchestra Concert

I saw such a good concert last night! It was the Scott Dunn Orchestra playing “The Hollywood Modernists: The Second Golden Age of Film Scoring” at the Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills.

This was music from Psycho, Our Town, To Kill a Mockingbird (so beautiful!), Rebel Without a Cause (extended suite), North by Northwest, Six Sequences for Orchestra from A Streetcar Named Desire, Too Late Blues (a “deep cut” by David Raksin, beautiful!) and East of Eden.

The orchestra is on the smaller side but so crisp and well balanced. I hadn’t heard a lot of these pieces in a while and taking them all in live with a reminder of how much I love this style. It felt like being a kid, catching parts of the movies on television, and being enchanted by the world as it had been just a couple of decades before my time—and, of course, the exquisitely American scoring, the precision of the colors and harmonies.

It’s a smaller venue, and it was an unexpected delight to catch up in the lobby with old friends, composers, filmmakers (director/author Nick Meyer) and others from our community. I literally turned around and saw against the wall the one and only Walter Koenig. I reassured him he was the most famous person there.

The next concert in this series is “Monsters, Murders, Spies & Space: Those Fabulous Films of the Seventies” on January 17, 2026. This promises music from Superman, The Godfather, Chinatown, The Sting, Taxi Driver and Murder on the Orient Express—and some special surprises. If you’re in the L.A. area and love this stuff, you’ve got to come!

To conclude 2025–26 season is a Golden Age concert on May 30, 2026.

Hope to see you there.