André Previn

André George Previn, born Andreas Ludwig Priwin in Berlin on April 6, 1929, was a German-American conductor, composer, and pianist who died on February 28, 2019. His career encompassed three distinct domains — Hollywood film music, jazz, and classical music — and he achieved significant recognition in each.

Previn was the second son and youngest of three children born to Charlotte and Jack Previn, a lawyer, judge, and music teacher whose own birthplace of Graudenz was then part of Germany and is now in Poland. All three children studied piano, but Previn demonstrated exceptional aptitude from the beginning, enrolling at the Berlin Conservatory at age six. In 1938, he was expelled from the conservatory on the grounds that he was Jewish, despite holding a full scholarship. The family departed Berlin for Paris, where Previn's father enrolled him at the Conservatoire de Paris to continue his studies in music theory. On October 20, 1938, the family sailed from Paris to New York City, continuing on to Los Angeles, where they arrived on November 26. A second cousin of Previn's father, Charles Previn, served as music director for Universal Studios. Previn became a naturalized American citizen in 1943, having learned English — his third language after German and French — through comic books, dictionaries, and films. He graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1946, performing at the ceremony alongside Richard M. Sherman, accompanying Sherman on piano while Sherman played flute.

Previn's film career began that same year, when MGM's music department hired him after noticing his work on a local radio program. He was still in high school at the time. His first official screen credit came with the 1949 Lassie entry The Sun Comes Up, a score he later described with self-deprecating candor after seeing it rerun on television. While a full-time MGM employee in 1950, he was drafted into military service. Stationed with the Sixth Army Band at the Presidio of San Francisco beginning in 1951, he spent two years taking private conducting lessons from Pierre Monteux, then conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Previn returned to Hollywood in 1953 and remained at MGM for sixteen years before resigning, feeling increasingly confined by the studio environment and wishing to pursue classical music more fully. His involvement with film nonetheless continued beyond his MGM tenure; he won an Academy Award for My Fair Lady in 1964, and his film work extended through Rollerball in 1975. Over the course of his career, Previn contributed to the music of more than fifty films as composer, conductor, and performer, earning four Academy Awards in total.

On Broadway, Previn composed the score for Coco, which received a Tony Award nomination for Best Musical in 1970. The production represented his most prominent contribution to the Broadway stage.

In jazz, Previn worked primarily as a pianist and accompanist, recording extensively with singers of the Great American Songbook, among them Ella Fitzgerald and Doris Day. He frequently performed in a trio format with bass and drums, collaborating with numerous prominent jazz instrumentalists. He also filmed television programs with Oscar Peterson in 1974 and with Fitzgerald in 1979. Jazz historian Ted Gioia, writing about the West Coast jazz scene to which Previn belonged, noted that at his best Previn was a persuasive and moving jazz musician with a hard-swinging piano style at times reminiscent of Horace Silver, though Gioia also observed that Previn became more of a popularizer of jazz than a dedicated practitioner. Dizzy Gillespie praised Previn's playing for possessing what Gillespie called "the flow," a quality he distinguished from mere technical proficiency or harmonic knowledge.

Previn's conducting career was extensive and spanned several of the world's major orchestras. He succeeded Sir John Barbirolli as music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra in 1967, serving until 1969. Beginning in 1968, he held the post of principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra for eleven years, during which time he and the LSO appeared on the BBC Television programme André Previn's Music Night. He served as music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra from 1975 to 1985, a tenure accompanied by a television series entitled Previn and the Pittsburgh. He was principal conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from 1985 to 1991, and music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1985 to 1989. He later served as chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic from 2002 to 2006 and also regularly conducted the Vienna Philharmonic. Across his career, Previn won ten Grammy Awards for recordings spanning all three areas of his work, along with an additional Grammy for lifetime achievement.