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 PROTOTYPE festival, now in its 10th year, presents new operas and music-theater works in smaller settings. "We were trying to create a black box opera movement," says co-founder Beth Morrison. -
Kelli O'Hara, Renée Fleming, and Joyce DiDonato star in a new opera based on Michael Cunningham's book. -
The new David Geffen Hall in Lincoln Center, home of the New York Philharmonic, opens this week. And while the outside is the same, everything inside has changed. -
In 2014, a study found that only 1.4% of orchestra musicians were Black. In 2022, it's hard to know if that number is better or worse. -
The big-voiced soprano is in her mid-thirties, and she didn't even hear an opera live until she was in her twenties. Now, she's a sought-after opera singer. -
Nottage, the only woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, has a new play on Broadway, an opera at Lincoln Center Theater and a Michael Jackson musical opening soon. -
Composer, conductor and MacArthur "genius" Mathew Aucoin just debuted his opera, 'Eurydice,' at the Met. The new work reinterprets an ancient, archetypal myth from the perspective of its namesake. -
The eloquent pianist used a work break imposed by the pandemic to learn something new: stage directing, a skill set she put to use in creating a multimedia recital. -
Even before the age of social-distancing, composer and conductor Eric Whitacre had been leading an online chorus for a decade. Choir members say the connection they foster is more important than ever. -
July 21 marks the centennial of the birth of violinist Isaac Stern. He was not only an acclaimed musician and advocate for the arts, but a devoted teacher who was a mentor to generations of musicians.
