André George Previn, KBE (/ˈprɛvɪn/; born Andreas Ludwig Priwin;
April 6, 1929 – February 28, 2019) was a German-born American pianist,
conductor, and composer. 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 (and one more for his Lifetime
Achievement). He had been 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.
Previn in October 1973
Early life
Previn was born inBerlin , Germany ,
the son of Charlotte (née Epstein; Frankfurt 1891–1986) and Jack Previn (Jakob Priwin; Graudenz
1885–1963), who was a lawyer, judge, and music teacher. He is said to have been
"a distant relative of" the composer Gustav Mahler. However, in a
pre-concert public interview at Lincoln
Center
In 1938, his Jewish family leftBerlin and via Paris
sailed to New York on October 20 and from
there to Los Angeles Los Angeles and
became a naturalized citizen of the United States Beverly
Hills High School
In 1951 and 1952, while stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco during his military service, Previn took private conducting lessons from Pierre Monteux, which he valued highly.
At theHollywood
studios
Previn came to prominence by arranging and composing Hollywood film scores, first working for MGM when he was still in high school in 1946 after the studio's music department noticed his work for a local radio program. The film studios, he said in 2005, "were always 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." At 18 he became a composer-conductor for the studio. His first official credit was for an entry in the Lassie series, The Sun Comes Up (1949), which much later he thought was "the most inept score you ever heard" after seeing a television rerun.
Previn remained with MGM for a decade and a half, but resigned in his early 30s. He told Emma Brockes of The Guardian in 2008: "At MGM you knew you were going to be working next year, you knew you were going to get paid. But I was too ambitious musically to settle for it. And I wanted to gamble with whatever talent I might have had."
His break with the film world in the 1960s was not as straightforward as he often tried to claim in later life. His film work continued until Rollerball (1975). Over his entire film career, Previn was involved in the music for over 50 movies as composer, conductor or performer.
Career in classical music
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 (LSO), 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. 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 1976 to 1984, he was music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) 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 1988.
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 (the LAPO's Executive VP and General Manager), including the dispute when Fleischmann failed to consult Previn before naming Salonen as Principal Guest Conductor of the orchestra, complete with a tour ofJapan
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.
Television
Previn also enjoyed a long relationship with the medium of television, featuring in Meet André Previn (1969) on London Weekend Television, the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show in 1971 and 1972 (BBC), André Previn's Music Night (conducting the London Symphony Orchestra—three programmes in 1973, others in 1975 and 1976), television interviews with other artists, appearances on Call My Bluff, and participation in documentaries about popular music and jazz during the 1970s and 1980s. Previn became known to a broad public through his television work. In theUnited Kingdom U.S. the television program "Previn and the
Pittsburgh
Previn is particularly remembered inBritain Chicago London
At a concert he conducted with the Grieg Concerto included in the program inBritain Britain
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 divorced her in 1969 during her hospitalization for a mental breakdown, and after Previn was caught having an affair with 23-year-old Mia Farrow, Dory resumed her career as a singer-songwriter with On My Way to Where (1970), 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 André Previn in theLondon
Previn's third marriage, in 1970, was to Mia Farrow. Before their divorce in 1979, Previn and Farrow had three biological children together—twins Matthew and Sascha, born in 1970, and Fletcher, born in 1974. They then adopted Vietnamese infants Lark Song and Summer "Daisy" Song (born October 6, 1974), 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. Lark died on Christmas Day 2008. 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. Previn wrote a brief memoir of his early years inHollywood
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 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 (the other being Alfred Newman). Previn was the only person in the history of the Academy Awards to receive three nominations in one year (1961). In 1970 he was nominated for a Tony Award as part ofCoco 's nomination for Best
Musical. 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 theBritish Empire
in 1996. (Not being a citizen of a Commonwealth realm, he was permitted to use
the post-nominal letters KBE but was not called "Sir André".) Previn
received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1998 in recognition of his contributions
to classical music and opera in the United States Recording
Academy
Previn made dozens of jazz recordings as both a leader and sideman, primarily during two periods of his career: from 1945 to 1967, and then again from 1989 to 2001, with just a handful of recordings in between and afterward (while he focused his career on conducting/recording classical music, and later on composing contemporary art music). Previn also did several crossover recordings with classical singers like Eileen Farrell, Leontyne Price or Kiri Te Kanawa, too, as well as several Easy-Listening records with piano and orchestra in the 1960s (beginning with Like Young. Secret Songs for Young Lovers, 1959. with David Rose and His Orchestra).
Like Oscar Peterson, whom Previn admired a great deal, and Bill Evans, Previn worked a lot as a trio pianist (usually with bass and drums). 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 focussed on the songbooks of popular composers (André Previn Plays Songs by Vernon Duke, 1958; André Previn Plays Songs by Harold Arlen, 1960; Ballads. Solo Jazz Standards, 1996; Alone: Ballads for Solo Piano, 2007), the late recording of songs by Harold Arlen with singer Sylvia McNair and bass player David Finck (Come Rain or Shine. The Harold Arlen Songbook, 1996), and his TV shows with Oscar Peterson (1974) – which Marlon Brando simply called "one of the greatest hours I ever saw on television" – and Ella Fitzgerald (1979) respectively.
Jazz critic and historian Ted Gioia wrote in his book about West Coast jazz, the scene to which Previn belonged:
Early life
Previn was born in
In 1938, his Jewish family left
In 1951 and 1952, while stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco during his military service, Previn took private conducting lessons from Pierre Monteux, which he valued highly.
At the
Previn came to prominence by arranging and composing Hollywood film scores, first working for MGM when he was still in high school in 1946 after the studio's music department noticed his work for a local radio program. The film studios, he said in 2005, "were always 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." At 18 he became a composer-conductor for the studio. His first official credit was for an entry in the Lassie series, The Sun Comes Up (1949), which much later he thought was "the most inept score you ever heard" after seeing a television rerun.
Previn remained with MGM for a decade and a half, but resigned in his early 30s. He told Emma Brockes of The Guardian in 2008: "At MGM you knew you were going to be working next year, you knew you were going to get paid. But I was too ambitious musically to settle for it. And I wanted to gamble with whatever talent I might have had."
His break with the film world in the 1960s was not as straightforward as he often tried to claim in later life. His film work continued until Rollerball (1975). Over his entire film career, Previn was involved in the music for over 50 movies as composer, conductor or performer.
Career in classical music
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 (LSO), 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. 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 1976 to 1984, he was music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) 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 1988.
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 (the LAPO's Executive VP and General Manager), including the dispute when Fleischmann failed to consult Previn before naming Salonen as Principal Guest Conductor of the orchestra, complete with a tour of
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.
Television
Previn also enjoyed a long relationship with the medium of television, featuring in Meet André Previn (1969) on London Weekend Television, the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show in 1971 and 1972 (BBC), André Previn's Music Night (conducting the London Symphony Orchestra—three programmes in 1973, others in 1975 and 1976), television interviews with other artists, appearances on Call My Bluff, and participation in documentaries about popular music and jazz during the 1970s and 1980s. Previn became known to a broad public through his television work. In the
Previn is particularly remembered in
At a concert he conducted with the Grieg Concerto included in the program in
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 divorced her in 1969 during her hospitalization for a mental breakdown, and after Previn was caught having an affair with 23-year-old Mia Farrow, Dory resumed her career as a singer-songwriter with On My Way to Where (1970), 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 André Previn in the
Previn's third marriage, in 1970, was to Mia Farrow. Before their divorce in 1979, Previn and Farrow had three biological children together—twins Matthew and Sascha, born in 1970, and Fletcher, born in 1974. They then adopted Vietnamese infants Lark Song and Summer "Daisy" Song (born October 6, 1974), 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. Lark died on Christmas Day 2008. 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. Previn wrote a brief memoir of his early years in
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 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 (the other being Alfred Newman). Previn was the only person in the history of the Academy Awards to receive three nominations in one year (1961). In 1970 he was nominated for a Tony Award as part of
Previn was appointed an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the
Jazz Recordings
Previn made dozens of jazz recordings as both a leader and sideman, primarily during two periods of his career: from 1945 to 1967, and then again from 1989 to 2001, with just a handful of recordings in between and afterward (while he focused his career on conducting/recording classical music, and later on composing contemporary art music). Previn also did several crossover recordings with classical singers like Eileen Farrell, Leontyne Price or Kiri Te Kanawa, too, as well as several Easy-Listening records with piano and orchestra in the 1960s (beginning with Like Young. Secret Songs for Young Lovers, 1959. with David Rose and His Orchestra).
Like Oscar Peterson, whom Previn admired a great deal, and Bill Evans, Previn worked a lot as a trio pianist (usually with bass and drums). 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 focussed on the songbooks of popular composers (André Previn Plays Songs by Vernon Duke, 1958; André Previn Plays Songs by Harold Arlen, 1960; Ballads. Solo Jazz Standards, 1996; Alone: Ballads for Solo Piano, 2007), the late recording of songs by Harold Arlen with singer Sylvia McNair and bass player David Finck (Come Rain or Shine. The Harold Arlen Songbook, 1996), and his TV shows with Oscar Peterson (1974) – which Marlon Brando simply called "one of the greatest hours I ever saw on television" – and Ella Fitzgerald (1979) respectively.
Jazz critic and historian Ted Gioia wrote in his book about West Coast jazz, the scene to which Previn belonged:
[His] 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.
Death
Previn died on
February 28, 2019, at home in Manhattan
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