Jeff Dunn
Jeff Dunn is a freelance critic with a B.A. in music and a Ph.D. in geologic education. A composer of piano and vocal music, he is a member of the National Association of Composers, USA, a former president of Composers, Inc., and has served on the Board of New Music Bay Area. A photomontage enthusiast, he illustrates his own reviews.
Articles by this Author
Chamber Music REVIEW
September 27, 2010
Does the personality of a composer matter? Will knowing more about the life of a composer enhance our experience of his or her music? “You bet!” is Other Minds’ answer, as judged from its Sept. 27 combo of exhibit, discussion, and performance that brought the remarkable Dane Rudhyar (1895-1985) back to life.
More about Other Minds »Feature Article
August 23, 2010
Symphony concerts are good places to bring friends. There’s excitement, variety, time to talk at intermission, a focal point to the evening, and a chance to do something together afterward. The fall season in the Bay Area is crammed with goodies everyone can love.
More "Six Orchestra Concerts for Casual Listeners and Experienced Fans" »Festival REVIEW
August 15, 2010
Ah! The Cabrillo Festival finale: “To hear infinity in the Mission San Juan Bautista and eternity in 97 minutes” — such was the hope implied by its “in aeternam” moniker.
More about Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music »Festival REVIEW
August 6, 2010
Sure, the Cabrillo Festival showcased a trio of distinctive, lauded — and breathing — composers on its opening night program. And yes, Music Director Marin Alsop and her band played their hearts out, as they usually do. But perhaps more impressive was the most neglected portion of the classical music communication channel: the audience.
More about Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music »CD REVIEW
August 3, 2010
If you head to iTunes, you can check out a great new recording of American compositions in the live DG Concerts series, for which John Adams conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in his own work. It used to be that new classical pieces, if they got recorded at all, took years to get on a CD. But things aren’t the way they used to be, thanks to the advent of the download.
More »
Upcoming Concert
July 16-25
Which variety of love do you prefer to listen to — hapless, or timeless? The first half of the final concert of this year’s Festival del Sole in Napa Valley, on July 25, will immerse itself in both, and will require deep breaths.
More »Chamber Music REVIEW
May 22, 2010
How in the world could the San Francisco Library lead the violist Pamela Freund-Striplen to a pool, “full of old fish, blind-stricken long ago … revealed only by the croaking of consumptive frogs”? Like the best adventures, the path was circuitous, but the result was a highly imaginative program for her Gold Coast Chamber Players that absorbed lucky listeners at the Lafayette Library Community Hall Saturday night.
More about Gold Coast Chamber Players »CD REVIEW
May 18, 2010
“What?!” you say, “another recording of Rhapsody in Blue?” Amazon lists 632 recordings of this music co-opted by United Airlines ads and 71 MP3 downloads. What’s so special about this rendition?
More »Chamber Orchestra/Orchestra REVIEW
May 11, 2010
Gustavo Dudamel brings a cheering crowd to their feet with a predictable, but audience-effective rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique symphony, while Jean-Yves Thibaudet entertains with Leonard Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety.
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May 1, 2010
Guest conductor Christoph Eschenbach lit flames in two symphonies with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Hall on Saturday evening. Whether he was conducting a familiar warhorse or a rarity Eschenbach made them sear.
More »Chamber Orchestra/Orchestra REVIEW
April 17, 2010
For Music Director David Robertson, it’s his rubber-man upper torso and windmill arm gestures. For violin soloist Gil Shaham, it’s a puckish crouch that enables instant flitting between positions within an inch of the conductor, the first-chair violinist, or the front edge of the stage.
More »Chamber Orchestra/Orchestra REVIEW
April 11, 2010
“Courageous and psychedelic” wowed one patron. “It wasn’t the Four Last Songs” (of Richard Strauss), belittled another. Such reflects the mixed reaction of audience members to the music and the vocal challenges faced by soprano Christine Brewer in David Carlson’s work The Promise of Time, the premiere of which formed the centerpiece to Sunday’s final concert of the Marin Symphony’s season.
More about Marin Symphony »Recital REVIEW
April 6, 2010
“It was somewhat excessive,” recalled Lera Auerbach onstage, understating the compulsion she felt in 1999 to keep composing preludes. Not satisfied after creating 24 of them for piano, one for every possible key signature (C major, A minor, and so on), she produced a second set of 24 for piano and violin. Far from exhausting her, this only whetted her appetite, so she wrote a third 24 for cello and piano.
More about San Francisco Performances »Chamber Orchestra/Orchestra REVIEW
March 20, 2010
Did the Santa Rosa Symphony on Saturday night live up to part of a public-school student poem, by “Cristobal,” posted in its concert-hall lobby?
Sounds frightful, amazing, destructive.
Beethoven, great composer —
Music as powerful as the sun.
Upcoming Concert
Sat March 27, 2010 8:00pm
If you plan to drive up I-80 to the next concert of the Vallejo Symphony to hear virtuoso Meredith Brown, you must be prepared to play her second-most-important instrument. No, not the French horn, but the one in which “Freeway Philharmonic’” members are extremely practiced: the steering wheel. More about Vallejo Symphony Orchestra »
Chamber Orchestra/Orchestra REVIEW
March 6, 2010
Patrons flipped over the first half of Saturday’s San Francisco Symphony concert. A premiere by Victor Kissine pleased all listeners I chatted with, from the conservative to the avant-garde. And soloist Christian Tetzlaff’s subjugation of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto so electrified the audience that he received a prolonged standing ovation, convention be damned, between its first and second movements.
More about San Francisco Symphony »CD REVIEW
March 2, 2010
I’ve covered so many scrape-a-thon concerts of new music featuring the cello that I’ve almost forgotten what a gorgeous, melodious instrument it is. With cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han’s release (on the ArtistLed label) of four duos they commissioned, the lyrical cello returns with welcome suffusion. More »
Upcoming Concert
Tue February 23, 2010 7:30pm
If search-engine hits are the Web election determining America’s most popular poet, then Emily Dickinson is currently in second or third place (along with Henry Longfellow), behind Walt Whitman. But unlike Whitman, her intensely personal poetry seeks a sympathetic reader, not a vast public sphere. And perhaps that is what drew the composer Gordon Getty to her. His song cycle on Dickinson's poetry, The White Election, will be performed, appropriately, on a Tuesday, Feb. 23.
More about Cal Performances »Recital REVIEW
February 6, 2010
Violinist Midori proved Saturday in Herbst Theatre, under the auspices of San Francisco Performances, that a healthy musical diet can consist almost solely of works written in the 1990s. Her superb musicianship and faultless programming instincts produced one of the best recent-music chamber concerts I have heard in some time.
More »Chamber Orchestra/Orchestra REVIEW
January 22, 2010
The Armenian proverb “We learn more from a clever rival than a stupid ally” was much in evidence in the second half of Friday’s Oakland East Bay Symphony concert. During that segment, the music of three little-known Armenian composers proved that derivative music can nevertheless be persuasive.
More about Oakland East Bay Symphony »
