André Previn

André Previn, born in 1929, German-born American pianist, conductor, and composer. He is known for his performances and recordings of British composers, especially William Walton and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Russian composers, including Sergey Prokofiev and Dmitry Shostakovich. Previn has received Academy Awards for four of his motion-picture scores (music), including My Fair Lady (1964).

Previn first studied music in Germany at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. His family, of Russian-Jewish origin, fled Nazi Germany in 1938 (see National Socialism), settling first in Paris, where Previn studied briefly at the Conservatory, and later in Los Angeles, California, where he became an American citizen in 1943. It was as a jazz pianist in the early 1940s that he began his musical career, proceeding later to compose music for motion pictures in Hollywood, California. He studied conducting in San Francisco, California, with French conductor Pierre Monteux in 1951, but did not make his professional conducting debut until 1963 with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Five years later he was appointed conductor-in-chief of the London Symphony Orchestra, with which he remained until 1979, excelling in vivid performances of late-19th-century and early-20th-century works. In 1977 he collaborated with British dramatist Tom Stoppard in a play for orchestra and actors: Every Good Boy Deserves Favor.

Previn served as music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra (1967 to 1969), the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (1976 to 1985), and the Los Angeles Philharmonic (1986 to 1989). He was appointed musical director of the British Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1985, subsequently becoming its conductor-in-chief from 1988 to 1992. In 1992 he returned to the London Symphony Orchestra as conductor laureate but continued to work with other orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, and the symphony orchestras of Boston, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. He returned to performing jazz in the early 1990s. Previn’s autobiography, No Minor Chords, describing his early career in Hollywood, was published in 1991.

Previn continued his career as a composer during the 1990s, writing mainly chamber works, but also composing pieces on a larger scale. These included a group of songs set to poems by American writer Toni Morrison, Honey and Rue (1991), and an opera based on the play A Streetcar Named Desire (1998) by American dramatist Tennessee Williams. In 2002 he wrote a violin concerto for German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, whom he married later that year. Also in 2002, he began a four-year appointment as music director of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra in Norway.