Few artists have shown the kind of range that the cosmopolitan, multi-talented André Previn did. He found major success as a conductor, jazz pianist, chamber musician, and composer.
Andreas Ludwig Priwin, as he was originally named, was born to Jewish parents in Berlin in 1929. The family fled the Nazi persecution of Jews and settled in Los Angeles in 1939. After his musical studies, Previn came into early contact with Hollywood, where he composed and arranged music for numerous films. He went on to win four Oscars and eleven Grammy Awards. He was also active as a jazz pianist, playing with many of the great jazz musicians of his time—collaborations well documented on record. Later, Previn composed a substantial amount of classical music, including a guitar concerto, a piano concerto, and the opera A Streetcar Named Desire (after Tennessee Williams’s play).
In the 1960s, André Previn began conducting, which became his main focus for the decades that followed. His modern, youthful approach to performance suited the spirit of the late, radical 1960s, and through television he became a widely appreciated musical figure, especially in Britain and the United States. He also worked with many major orchestras and served as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra (1968–1979), the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (1976–1984), the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (1985–1988), the Los Angeles Philharmonic (1985–1989), and the Oslo Philharmonic (2002–2006). He also worked with the Vienna Philharmonic for several decades.
As a conductor, Previn had a broad repertoire that stretched from Haydn and Mozart to contemporary modern music, with a particular fondness for British and Russian composers. He collaborated with many leading soloists, including Yo-Yo Ma, Kyung-Wha Chung, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Itzhak Perlman and Anne-Sophie Mutter (with whom he was once married).
On record, he is one of the most extensively represented conductors of the postwar era, with a rich discography for labels such as RCA, Sony, EMI/Warner, Decca, DG, Telarc, and Philips. Among other achievements, he made the first complete stereo recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra for RCA in the late 1960s, and he produced acclaimed interpretations of music by Walton, Gershwin, Tchaikovsky, Korngold, and Rachmaninov. Previn considered his greatest recorded achievement to be his Telarc album of Richard Strauss’s tone poems with the Vienna Philharmonic.
Previn was a meticulous musician who cared deeply about high technical standards, yet his interpretations also often carried spontaneity and intensity. Some critics saw him as somewhat lightweight, arguing that he did not always penetrate the inner depths of the music. But his insightful readings of works such as Debussy’s Images, Berlioz’s Requiem, and Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony show that this was far from the whole story.
