From Hell to Hollywood
May 30, 2026
The Scott Dunn Orchestra
🇺🇸 The Wallis, Beverly Hills, CA, USA
Featuring: “Overture from The Alamo” and “Rawhide”
A packed house at The Wallis in Beverly Hills witnessed a curated collection of classic film music written largely by Jewish composers who flocked to the United States between the two World Wars to escape fascism in their home countries, befitting the program title, “From Hell to Hollywood.”
The program featured the Scott Dunn Orchestra, known colloquially as the SDO. Namesake Scott Dunn came to conducting from a background as a pianist, after a detour as an eye surgeon. Dunn founded the SDO in partnership with the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in 2024.
Dunn is notable for his advocacy of film music as a serious concert art form and the orchestra is dedicated to presenting classic and contemporary film scores in the concert hall to celebrate Hollywood’s rich musical heritage.
For “From Hell to Hollywood,” Dunn and the SDO performed music composed between 1933 and 1961 by nine emigrée composers.
In a bold programming move, the concert opened with “Fanfare for a Bowl Concert” by Schoenberg, a composer who came close to writing for film but never did. A minor quibble, the work is for brass and percussion and the placement of the entire brass section to Dunn’s right affected the overall balance in the hall.
“Fanfare for a Bowl Concert” was intended for the Hollywood Bowl, the juxtaposition underlined the fact that the Bowl embraced film music long before other local venues. (The Bowl board members were not fans of Schoenberg so although the work was written in 1945 to open a summer concert it was not performed until the 1970s.)
Dimitri Tiomkin, 1960
Dimitri Tiomkin had a long association with the Hollywood Bowl, in fact his first works performed there were written for Albertina Rasch ballets.
READ: Dimitri Tiomkin and the Hollywood Bowl
The Frank Campbell-Watson arrangement of Max Steiner’s “Tara: A Short Tone Poem” was a delight. Totally ignorant myself, I later found that Campbell-Watson’s legacy includes his editorial work on two Gershwin works, An American in Paris and Concerto in F, the latter closely associated with Dimitri Tiomkin who gave the European premiere with Gershwin present.
Performing in the intimate 500-seat Bram Goldsmith Theater, The Wallis is the near-perfect venue for the SDO. (As violinist and orchestrator Paul Henning noted after the concert, the audience sight lines are faultless and no one is more than 50 feet from the stage.) In both size and instrumentation, the orchestra closely resembles a Golden Age Hollywood studio orchestra. The eccentricities of those groups make adapting the music challenging. For example, for Captain Blood by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the parts for the five clarinets in the original Warner Bros. recording orchestra need to be re-written for a standard orchestra with woodwinds in pairs.
Adding to his conducting duties, Dunn had a hand in some of the arrangements along with stalwarts Christopher Palmer and Patrick Russ, both true pioneers in bringing music initially intended solely to be heard in a movie theater with projected images to audiences in the concert hall.
Newly adapted by Dunn for this concert, “Nora’s Theme” from Of Human Bondage, also by Korngold, offered a fitting contrast to the composer’s swashbuckling “Main Title” from Captain Blood arranged by Patrick Russ.
Max Steiner’s Casablanca suite embodies one of the main pitfalls of performing film music in concert. Steiner’s use of musical “stingers” (music punctuating on-screen action) and the interpolation of pre-existing music, such as “Columbia, the Gem of Ocean” can feel out of place when divorced from the film visuals. That said, you have to love Steiner’s score for the film. (Although I always remember BYU archivist James Dark’s perceptive comment that you could hear Casablanca coming in his scores leading up to the masterful work. That was based on a chronological hearing of Steiner’s music as the acetate discs in the Steiner collection were being transferred.)
Another Dunn arrangement for this concert, “Speak Low” from One Touch of Venus, was a welcome addition to the more popular and familiar works presented.
Closing out the first half was music by Franz Waxman for Sunset Blvd., a film recently stunningly restored by Paramount Pictures with particular attention to the film’s sound and music.
At intermission, every other face in the lobby looked vaguely famous or familiar. Seen among the crowd were writer Jon Burlingame, film archivist Fritz Herzog, and record producer Robert Townson.
Music by Waxman from the 1954 film Rear Window opened the second half. You can be the judge as to how much this score influenced Bernard Herrmann, who would begin his famous collaboration with director Alfred Hitchcock the following year.
Throughout the evening the large screen behind the orchestra carried titles and images, often film poster art. For the “Love Duet” dance from Lili the visuals from the film with Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer added to the appreciation of Bronislau Kaper’s music score.
The music from Exodus was a treat and hearing that second and third generation family members were present for composers from Ernest Gold to Franz Waxman added a thread of continuity to the evening’s theme. Above and beyond the film studios, the composer’s families, notably Rozsa, Tiomkin, and Waxman, have financially supported the concert presentation of film music.
Writing film music is a solitary endeavor and the composers themselves often spoke of the long hours from dawn to dusk that were required to create this enduring music that now lives not only on the soundtrack but also in concert presentations such as this one.
Alamo British Quad
Choosing The Alamo Overture, arranged by Russ and Palmer, to represent Dimitri Tiomkin provided the perfect segue to the Ben-Hur Prelude.
In fact, the closing numbers by Miklos Rózsa, from Ben-Hur and El Cid brought back memories. Thirty years ago I assisted Pat Russ in reconstructing the “Love Theme” from El Cid, a sublime transcendental work, for a recording by the New Zealand Symphony. Since that time I had only heard the work performed live once. Concertmaster Bruce Dukov’s performance of the violin solos were a joy to experience. In addition to Dukov, the orchestra included members who deeply appreciate and love this music, at least two of which have contributed greatly, Rob Frear (on trumpet) and Paul Henning.
Dunn, beyond his advocacy for film music, brings to the podium unbridled energy and enthusiasm to energize the crowd. And in lieu of program notes he brings the backstories of the composers to life from the stage.
After RĂłzsa’s “March of the Charioteers” from Ben-Hur, another rousing theme, this one by Dimitri Tiomkin from the television series Rawhide, was performed as the Encore, and then performed again as the second Encore. As the crowd lingered, the concert program reinforced why this music from films and television is so beloved.
Warren M. Sherk, May 31, 2026
From Hell to Hollywood program insert