Jeff Lunden
Jeff Lunden is a freelance arts reporter and producer whose stories have been heard on NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition, as well as on other public radio programs.
Lunden contributed several segments to the Peabody Award-winning series The NPR 100, and was producer of the NPR Music series Discoveries at Walt Disney Concert Hall, hosted by Renee Montagne. He has produced more than a dozen documentaries on musical theater and Tin Pan Alley for NPR — most recently A Place for Us: Fifty Years of West Side Story.
Other documentaries have profiled George and Ira Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, Harold Arlen and Jule Styne. Lunden has won several awards, including the Gold Medal from the New York Festival International Radio Broadcasting Awards and a CPB Award.
Lunden is also a theater composer. He wrote the score for the musical adaptation of Arthur Kopit's Wings (book and lyrics by Arthur Perlman), which won the 1994 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical. Other works include Another Midsummer Night, Once on a Summer's Day and adaptations of The Little Prince and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for Theatreworks/USA.
Lunden is currently working with Perlman on an adaptation of Swift as Desire, a novel of magic realism from Like Water for Chocolate author Laura Esquivel. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
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The New York Philharmonic launches its season with a new music director and executive director. The Metropolitan Opera's season starts with a young music director.
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Born 100 years ago on Aug. 25, 1918, Bernstein was a larger-than-life character — on stage as a conductor, at the piano as a composer, on TV as an educator and in a sometimes tangled personal life.
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Knussen, who wrote symphonies, chamber music and operas, is likely best known for his collaborations with children's author Maurice Sendak on adaptions like 1979's Where The Wild Things Are.
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Since 2009, the maximum security prison has been home to music workshops put on by Carnegie Hall and led by some of New York City's top musicians.
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In 1983, the Canadian Opera Company was the first to use simultaneous translations projected above the stage. Now it's an expected part of the opera-going experience.
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One hundred fifty composers, from the 12th century to today, are part of The Psalms Experience, performances of all 150 psalms during Lincoln Center's White Light Festival in New York.
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The opera, presented by Opera Philadelphia with the Apollo Theater, had its world premiere Sept. 16. It revisits the house at the center of the bombing and its impact on Philadelphia's youth today.
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Cook became famous for her parts in Leonard Bernstein's Candide and Meredith Willson's The Music Man. Then, when Broadway roles became scarce, she reinvented herself as a concert and cabaret artist.
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Beth Morrison is not your typical moneyed arts patron — but over the past decade, she's managed to gather the funding and venue support to produce works by some of today's most innovative composers.
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Saariaho isn't the first woman composer to stage an opera at New York's Metropolitan Opera — just the first in more than a century. Her opera, L'Amour de Loin, has its New York premiere this week.