By SHIRLEY GUELLER
The Halifax Herald

WITH A CD of a new work scheduled for release early this year in Cape Town, South Africa, Leslie Dunner, is seeing a tangible result of his passion for contemporary music.

The former musical director of Symphony Nova Scotia, in Halifax from 1996 to 1999, was in South Africa in 2004 for concerts, an opera, a ballet and a visit to the country's famed vineyards.

While there, he conducted the world premiere of South African composer Hendrik Hofmeyr's Sinfonia Africana, with the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, Olympiad gold-medallist University of Stellenbosch Choir and Namibian soprano Sabina Mosslow.

"It is a 60-minute work of excitement, complexity, impressive in scope and scale, Mahleresque in colour, technically challenging for both instrumentalists and conductor," says Dunner, who is now music director and principal conductor of the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago.

He was delighted to work with Hofmeyr, the 1997 laureate of the international Queen Elizabeth of the Belgians' competition for composition, who is one of South Africa's foremost composers and, with 100 works to his credit, one of its most prolific.

Dunner says he loves all forms of music, and the form he loves best is the one he is busy with - symphony concerts ("love them"), opera ("most challenging") and ballet ("exhilarating"), but where his hands really begin to talk is when he discusses Dialogues, a piece by the American composer Stephen Paulus.

"At my request," he says, "Paulus worked with seven fledgling composers between the ages of 11 and 16 in Annapolis, (Maryland) and incorporated in the score their ideas and what each of them was trying to express.

"We had complete buy-in by the audience and the city took ownership of a piece that will always belong to them," he said a recent interview.

The premiere of that piece was at the end of his last season as music director of the Annapolis Symphony in 2003, a season which he began with another new and non-traditional work, also by Paulus.

Voices from the Gallery combines music with narration and visuals of the art works by Michelangelo and Picasso and, like SNS's recent performances of the multimedia offering The Planets, makes music more relevant to new audiences.

Dunner didn't start out as a musician. As one of the top one per cent of students in New York state after attending the High School of Music and Art, (when he also took courses simultaneously at the Manhattan School of Music), he won an engineering scholarship to the University of Rochester (since his parents didn't believe music was a good career).

At the age of 12, he had become intrigued by the clarinet, noticing that whenever a wind ensemble played at his school it was the clarinetist who was always "fiddling."

"I knew such a busy musician could never be bored," he says, "so I took it up."

But the "fiddling" he soon discovered, was adjusting reeds, and reeds are something he soon grew to hate.

At the same time, from a working class family and not yet a teenager, he had made up his mind that while he didn't know what he wanted to do, it certainly would never involve a nine-to-five job.

He would enjoy what he chose, he decided, and this would involve travel.

As a young university student, he decided engineering wasn't for him. He went off to a music course in Nice, France, spent a couple of weeks in Norway, followed by a hitchhiking race back to Paris, and then flew home.

There, he formally dropped out of engineering school, but discovered that his clarinet teacher had arranged a music scholarship. So it was back to Rochester, where he eventually earned a bachelor's degree, followed by a double master's degree in musicology and theory from Queen's College.

How did he come to conducting?

While he was at Queen's where he taught an undergraduate course in 20th century music, he had to conduct an ensemble of his students and found it to be "really cool."

He then began to look for a college where he could study conducting and was accepted on full scholarship and fellowship at Cincinnati for a third master's degree, which was then converted to a doctorate in orchestral conducting.

From then on, that was where his heart lay, and his childhood criteria had been fulfilled.

He has held positions in Detroit as resident, associate and assistant conductor with its symphony orchestra over 11 years; he was assistant conductor to Kurt Masur with the New York Philharmonic; he has been music adviser to the Harlem Festival Orchestra in Harlem where he was born; he has worked with the American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Washington Ballet and has guest conducted throughout America, as well as in Russia, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

He was also the first winner of the Colorado Philharmonic National Conducting Competition, and the first American prize winner in the Arturo Toscanini International Conducting Competition.

In 1994, he was selected to participate in the American Symphony Orchestra League's Leonard Bernstein American Conductor's Program.

Dunner fulfilled engagements with the Joffrey Ballet and its production of The Nutcracker in cities such as Chicago, Washington and Detroit.

Shirley Gueller is a freelance writer living in Halifax.

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