André Previn


André George Previn was a German-American pianist, composer, arranger, and conductor.
His career was three-pronged. Starting by arranging and composing Hollywood film scores for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Previn was involved in the music for over 50 films over his entire career. He won four Academy Awards for his film work and ten Grammy Awards for his recordings. He was also the music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Oslo Philharmonic, as well as the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. In jazz, Previn was a pianist-interpreter and arranger of songs from the Great American Songbook, was piano-accompanist to singers of jazz standards, and was a trio pianist.

Early life

Previn was born in Berlin into a Jewish family, the second son and last of three children of Charlotte and Jack Previn, who was a lawyer, judge, and music teacher born in Graudenz, then in Germany but which is now part of Poland. The oldest son Steve Previn became a director. The year of Previn's birth is uncertain. Whereas most published reports give 1929, Previn himself stated that 1930 was his birth year. All three children received piano lessons and Previn was the one who enjoyed them from the start and displayed the most talent. At six, he enrolled at the Berlin Conservatory. In 1938, Previn's father was told that his son was no longer welcome at the conservatory, despite André receiving a full scholarship in recognition of his abilities, on the grounds that he was Jewish.
In 1938, the family had applied for American visas and during the nine-month wait to obtain them, left Berlin for Paris. Previn's father enrolled his son into the Paris Conservatory where André learned music theory. On October 20, 1938, the family left Paris and sailed to New York City. Their journey continued to Los Angeles, arriving on November 26. His father's second cousin Charles Previn was music director for Universal Studios. Previn became a naturalized US citizen in 1943. He learned English, his third language after German and French, through comic books and other reading materials with a dictionary, and watching films. In 1946 he graduated from Beverly Hills High School and performed with Richard M. Sherman at the ceremony; Previn played the piano, accompanying Sherman, who played the flute.

In the film studios

Previn was involved in creating the music for over 50 films and won four Academy Awards for his work.
Previn's career began in 1946, when he was still in high school, as a composer, conductor, and arranger at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, after their music department noticed his work for a local radio program and wished to hire him. Previn recalled that MGM were "looking for somebody who was talented, fast and cheap and, because I was a kid, I was all three. So they hired me to do piecework and I evidently did it very well." His first official credit was for an entry in the Lassie series, The Sun Comes Up, which much later he thought was "the most inept score you ever heard" after seeing a television rerun.
Previn was a full-time employee at MGM. He was called for military service in 1950. While stationed with the Sixth Army Band at the Presidio of San Francisco, Previn took private conducting lessons from Pierre Monteux, then conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, which he valued highly, for two years from 1951. In 1953, Previn returned to Hollywood and focused his attention on film scores and jazz. Previn stayed at MGM for 16 years, but despite the secure job and good pay, had grown increasingly confined and desired to pursue classical music. He resigned from MGM at 32, wanting "to gamble with whatever talent I might have had."
His break with the film world in the 1960s was not as straightforward as he claimed in later life. He won a 1964 Oscars for Best Scoring of Music - Adaptation or Treatment for My Fair Lady . His film work continued until Rollerball. Over his entire film career, Previn was involved in the music for over 50 movies as composer, conductor or performer.

In jazz

Previn described himself as a musician who played jazz, not a jazz musician. But he proved to be a gifted jazz-piano interpreter and arranger of songs from the “great American songbook,” winning the respect of prominent dedicated jazz artists. He separately worked as piano-accompanist to singers of jazz standards, from Ella Fitzgerald to Doris Day, recording prolifically. And like Oscar Peterson, whom he admired a great deal, and Bill Evans, he worked often as a trio pianist, usually with bass and drums, collaborating with dozens of famed jazz instrumentalists. Previn also memorably filmed TV shows with Peterson and Fitzgerald. Jazz critic and historian Ted Gioia wrote in his book about West Coast jazz, the scene to which Previn belonged:
projects varied greatly in terms of quality and jazz content, but at his best Previn could be a persuasive, moving jazz musician. Despite his deep roots in symphonic music, Previn largely steered clear of Third Stream classicism in his jazz work, aiming more at an earthy, hard-swinging piano style at times reminiscent of Horace Silver. Long before his eventual retreat from his jazz work, Previn had become something of a popularizer of jazz rather than a serious practitioner of the music. At his best, however, his music reflected a strong indigenous feel for the jazz idiom.

Dizzy Gillespie on Previn:
He has the flow, you know, which a lot of guys don't have and won't ever get. Yeah. I heard him play and I knew. A lot of guys, they have the technique, the harmonic sense. They've got the perfect coordination. And, yeah, all that's necessary. But you need something more, you know? Even if you only make an oooooooo, like that, you got to have the flow.

As a conductor and composer of classical music

As conductor

He was music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Oslo Philharmonic, as well as the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
In 1967, Previn succeeded Sir John Barbirolli as music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra. In 1968, he began his tenure as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, serving in that post until 1979. During his LSO tenure, he and the LSO appeared on the BBC Television programme André Previn's Music Night. Previn described the Indian classical album recorded with Ravi Shankar in 1971, Concerto for Sitar & Orchestra, as "absolute, total, utter shit". However, during his period with the LSO, according to the music critic Martin Bernheimer, Previn gained the reputation of being "a first-rate conductor of second-rate music."
From 1975 to 1985, he was music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and, in turn, had another television series with the PSO entitled Previn and the Pittsburgh. He was then principal conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from 1985 to 1991.
In 1985, he became music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Although Previn's tenure with the orchestra was deemed satisfactory from a professional perspective, other conductors, including Kurt Sanderling, Simon Rattle, and Esa-Pekka Salonen, did a better job at selling out concerts. Previn clashed frequently with Ernest Fleischmann, including the dispute when Fleischmann failed to consult Previn before naming Salonen as Principal Guest Conductor of the orchestra, complete with a tour of Japan. As a result of Previn's objections, Salonen's title and Japanese tour were withdrawn; however, shortly thereafter, in April 1989, Previn resigned. Four months later, Salonen was named Music Director Designate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, officially taking the post of Music Director in October 1992.
Previn was music director of the Oslo Philharmonic from 2002 to 2006, and in 2009 he was appointed Principal Guest Conductor of Tokyo's NHK Symphony Orchestra.

As composer

André Previn left two concert overtures, several tone poems, 14 concerti, a symphony for strings, incidental music to a British play; a rich trove of chamber music ; several works for solo piano; dozens of songs ; a monodrama for soprano, string quartet and piano ; a musical each for New York and London ; and two successful operas.

Television

In his capacity as conductor, mainly, Previn enjoyed a long relationship with the medium of television. He featured in Meet André Previn on London Weekend Television, the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show in 1971 and 1972, André Previn's Music Night, and television interviews with other musicians. He made appearances on Call My Bluff and participated in documentaries about popular music and jazz during the 1970s and 1980s. In the United Kingdom he worked on TV with the London Symphony Orchestra. In the U.S. the television program Previn and the Pittsburgh featured him in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

"Andrew Preview"

British TV audiences witnessed his comic acting skills when he was introduced as "Mr. Andrew Preview" on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show in 1971. This involved his conducting a performance of Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto with Eric Morecambe as the inept soloist, having been tricked into doing it by being told that Yehudi Menuhin would be his solo violinist. Playing the comedy straight, the annoyed Previn then remarks: "I'll go fetch my baton. It's in Chicago." This comic ad-lib made Morecambe immediately realise the sketch would be a success. Later in the sketch Previn accuses Morecambe of playing "all the wrong notes"; Morecambe grits his teeth, grabs Previn by the lapels, and retorts that he has been playing "all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order".
Because of other commitments, the only opportunity available for Previn to learn his part in the show was in the back of the taxi from the airport, but the talent he showed for comedy won high praise from his co-performers. He made a second appearance in their eighth series. In the sketch, he is tricked into visiting the pair again, and they suggest that if he works with them again, he could receive a knighthood; he conducts a 1920s-style dance band as the pair sing, and then joins them at the end of the episode in singing Bring Me Sunshine. Previn later appeared in the 1972 special as a bus conductor in a feature called "I worked with Morecambe and Wise and look what happened to me".
Previn himself recalled in 2005 that people in Britain still recall the sketch years later: "Taxi drivers still call me Mr Preview". He later said he was happy that the sketch meant as much to everyone else as it did to him, and that several parts of it were improvised.

Documentary

Previn was the subject of a two-hour film by Tony Palmer entitled 'The Kindness of Strangers' - after the closing words of his opera then in production, in 1998 - which followed Previn for a year at engagements around the world, and included interviews with Previn and rehearsals for the opera. The film was issued on DVD in 2009 by Voiceprint Records; an earlier issue had cut 30 minutes from it.

Personal life

Previn was married five times. His first marriage, in 1952, was to jazz singer Betty Bennett, with whom he had two daughters, Claudia Previn Stasny and Alicia Previn. Previn divorced Bennett in 1957, a few months before she gave birth to Alicia.
In 1959, he married Dory Langan. A singer-songwriter, Dory became widely known as a lyricist with whom Previn collaborated on several Academy Award-nominated film scores during their marriage. After Previn separated from her in 1968 during her hospitalization for a mental breakdown, Dory resumed her career as a singer-songwriter with On My Way to Where, a critically acclaimed album whose confessional lyrics were described as "searingly honest", and chronicled both her mental health struggles and the infidelity that she alleged had at once precipitated the end of her marriage to Previn and exacerbated her intermittent mental illness. In 2013, jazz singer Kate Dimbleby and pianist Naadia Sheriff revisited Dory Previn's musical reflections on her marriage to Previn in the London cabaret show, Beware Of Young Girls: The Dory Previn Story.
Previn's third marriage, in 1970, was to Mia Farrow, whom he began dating in 1968. Previn and Farrow had three biological children together—fraternal twins Matthew and Sascha, born before they were married, and Fletcher, born in 1974. They then adopted Vietnamese infants Lark Song and Summer "Daisy" Song, followed by Soon-Yi Previn, a Korean child whose age a physician's bone scan placed between six and eight years old and whose unknown birth date her adoptive parents estimated as October 8, 1970. Previn and Farrow divorced in 1979. Lark died on Christmas Day 2008, aged 35; reports at the time suggested she had died of AIDS-related pneumonia. In the aftermath of the scandal involving Soon-Yi and Mia Farrow's partner Woody Allen, Previn said of Soon-Yi, "She does not exist."
Previn's most durable marriage was his fourth. In January 1982 he married Heather Sneddon. They had a son, Lukas. Previn wrote a brief memoir of his early years in Hollywood, No Minor Chords, which was published in 1991, edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and dedicated to Heather. This marriage ended in divorce after 17 years.
His fifth marriage, in 2002, was to the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, for whom in the previous year he had composed his Violin Concerto. They announced their divorce in August 2006, but continued to work together in concerts afterwards.

Honours and awards

Previn was nominated for 11 Academy Awards. He won four times, in 1958, 1959, 1963 and 1964. He is one of the few composers to have accomplished the feat of winning back-to-back Oscars, and one of only two to have done so on two occasions. Previn was the only person in the history of the Academy Awards to receive three nominations in one year.
In 1970 he was nominated for a Tony Award as part of Coco's nomination for Best Musical. In 1974, he composed the musical score for The Good Companions starring John Mills in London. In 1977 he became an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music. The 1977 television show Previn and the Pittsburgh was nominated for three Emmy awards.
Previn was appointed an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1996. Previn received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1998 in recognition of his contributions to classical music and opera in the United States. In 2005 he was awarded the international Glenn Gould Prize and in 2008 won Gramophone magazine's Lifetime Achievement Award for his work in classical, film, and jazz music. In 2010, the Recording Academy honored Previn with a Lifetime Achievement Grammy.

Death

Previn died on February 28, 2019, at home in Manhattan at the age of 89. No cause was released.

Recordings

Previn's discography contains hundreds of recordings in film, jazz, classical music, theatre, and contemporary classical music. Because of the huge number of recordings, the following lists are necessarily highly selective. A full discography is available in Frédéric Döhl: , Stuttgart 2012, pp. 295–319.

Film music

Most of the films which incorporate Previn's music are still available as videos/DVDs and/or as soundtrack records. Some of his soundtracks have been reissued in recent years, including those from Elmer Gantry, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Inside Daisy Clover, and Dead Ringer.

Jazz recordings

Previn made dozens of jazz recordings, as both leader and sideman, primarily during two periods: from 1945 to 1967, and from 1989 to 2001, with just a handful of recordings in between or afterward. He also did crossover recordings with such classical singers as Eileen Farrell, Leontyne Price and Kiri Te Kanawa, as well as several easy-listening records with piano and orchestra in the 1960s.
Following his performance on Shelly Manne's recording Modern Jazz Performances of Songs from My Fair Lady in 1956, Previn released several albums of jazz interpretations of songs from broadway musicals as well as several solo piano recordings focused on the songbooks of popular composers, the late recording of songs by Harold Arlen with singer Sylvia McNair and bass player David Finck, and his TV shows with Oscar Peterson which Marlon Brando simply called "one of the greatest hours I ever saw on television" and Ella Fitzgerald respectively.

Jazz recordings as leader/co-leader

with Buddy Bregman
with Benny Carter
with Michael Feinstein
with Helen Humes
with Barney Kessel
with Shelly Manne
with The Mitchells: Red Mitchell, Whitey Mitchell and Blue Mitchell
with Lyle Murphy
with Pete Rugolo

Orchestral music

Previn's recorded repertory as a conductor focused on standards of the Classical, Romantic and Modern eras. In opera, however, he recorded only Der Schauspieldirektor, Die Fledermaus, and Ravel’s two short operas, as well as his own A Streetcar Named Desire.
He favored the symphonic music of Berlioz, Brahms and Strauss, and placed a special emphasis on violin and piano concertos and on ballets. Only a few of his recordings were of music before Haydn and Mozart or of atonal or serial avant-garde pieces. In 20th-century music his repertory highlit specific composers of late Romanticism and Modernism: Barber, Britten, Gershwin, Korngold, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Shostakovich, Strauss, Vaughan Williams, Walton and Shapero. Previn recorded for RCA, EMI, Telarc and Deutsche Grammophon.
Noteworthy as interpretations, for various reasons, are his recordings of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, Walton's First Symphony, the Vaughan Williams symphonies, Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony, Rachmaninoff's piano concertos, Walton's Belshazzar’s Feast, Orff's Carmina Burana and Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night’s Dream, all with the London Symphony Orchestra; and Strauss's horn concertos, with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Chamber music and solo piano

Academy Awards

;Best Music – Scoring of a Musical Picture
;Best Score – Adaptation or Treatment
Previn received Grammy Awards and nominations:
;Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
;Best Instrumental Soloist
;Best Classical Crossover Album
;Best Chamber Music Performance
;Best Choral Performance'
;Best Performance by an Orchestra
;Best Sound Track Album
;Best Jazz Performance – Soloist or Small Group