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 American Federation of Musicians' fund will reduce benefits for an estimated 20,000 of its 80,000 members due to stresses caused by the 2008 financial crisis — and a steadily aging membership. -
Glenn Dicterow became the youngest concertmaster in New York Philharmonic history in 1980, when he was just 31. After spending more than half his life leading the violin section, he says goodbye. -
Under music director Alan Gilbert, the orchestra is taking a page from the visual arts world by launching an 11-day festival featuring both established and emerging composers. -
The soundtrack to Disney's Frozen has been the biggest-selling album of 2014, topping the Billboard album chart for 13 weeks. -
ASCAP — the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers — was founded on Feb. 13, 1914, to protect its members' copyrights by monitoring public performances of their music. It hasn't been an easy century; in fact, just about every victory has come as the result of litigation. -
The legendary Harlem nightclub and the artists and music it's synonymous with are being celebrated in a new Broadway revue. Jeff Lunden talks to cast members and the creators about the pleasures and perils of paying homage to a place with a problematic history. -
Instead of killing herself, Mukhtar Mai took her rapists to court — and won. Her story has been turned into an opera which receives its world premiere in New York.
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By most estimates, the trouble-plagued show will have lost about $60 million when it closes tomorrow. It has been commercial theater's most stunning flop. -
When billionaire John Paulson first bought Steinway & Sons, it struck fear in the hearts of musicians. Would Steinway's famously handcrafted pianos be changed, for the sake of efficiency? -
The Leonard Bernstein Letters, edited by Nigel Simeone, compiles correspondence to and from the legendary composer and conductor. The letters — from serious to silly — offer a detailed look at both the distinguished career and the adventurous personal life of a singular American genius.
