For the first time in nearly 70 years, the Concerto for Violin by Vernon Duke will be performed in orchestral form, thanks to the affinity of University of Iowa School of Music Distinguished Alumnus Scott Dunn.

Dunn, associate conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, will conduct the UI Symphony Orchestra and soloist Tricia Park in this rare performance (the first of its kind since 1944) at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 28, in the Main Lounge of the Iowa Memorial Union.

"I've long been interested in music that lies in the intersection between so-called 'classical' or concert music and pop music—so called 'crossover' music and 'crossover' composers," Dunn says. "Vernon Duke, one of Gershwin's best friends, started life as a proper classical composer but Gershwin convinced him to change his name from Vladimir Dukelskyand to try his hand at popular songwriting and working in musical theater."

Duke embarked on a highly successful career composing songs and incidental music for Broadway and Hollywood, including Autumn in New York, April in Paris, I Can’t Get Started, Cabin in the Sky, and The Ziegfeld Follies. His works—part of the Great American Songbook—have been performed and recorded by artists including Tony Bennett, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Wynton Marsalis, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, and Thelonious Monk.

But throughout his songwriting success, Duke also continued to write "serious" music, which was championed during his life by Serge Koussevitsky and Sergei Prokofiev, but was ignored for decades before Dunn made it a personal cause.

"I first became aware of Duke through composer friends, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett and film composer Leonard Rosenman," Dunn explains. "Bennett gave me the un-orchestrated Piano Concerto in C to look at, which I eventually orchestrated and played at Carnegie Hall in 1999. And even prior to that—out in L.A., through Rosenman—I became friends with Duke's widow, Kay Duke Ingalls.

"Last fall when we resurrected Duke's End of St. Petersburg oratorio, along with the piano concerto Dedicases and Epitaph cantata for the Diaghilev festival in St. Petersburg, Kay came to Russia and attended all the rehearsals, concerts, and symposia."

To prepare for the March 28 performance, Dunn and Park, first violinist of the Maia Quartet from 2005-2011, performed a piano reduction of the 1941 violin concerto in a Dec. 16, 2011, event in Riverside Recital Hall.

"I first met Tricia when she was still on faculty here at the UI. We collaborated on a recital as part of a series of appearances I was doing here in conjunction with my 2010 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. We became instant musical 'soul mates' and are very close personal friends as well. She is an amazing person and a spectacular player.

"Tricia and I are planning to record an album of arrangements of Gershwin (by Heifetz) and of Vernon Duke songs (arranged by Richard Rodney Bennett). It's music we both really love. Longer term, it would be wonderful to get the violin concerto recorded—talks are going on about that right now."

The free March 28 concert will also feature 19th-century American composer George Frederick Bristow’s Rip Van Winkle Overture, conducted by graduate student Kira Horel, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (Pathetique), conducted by William LaRue Jones, director of the UI Symphony.

Learn more at scott-dunn.com, and read a biography of Jones at http://music.uiowa.edu/faculty_staff/profiles/jones_william.shtml.