André George Previn (/ˈprɛvɪn/; born Andreas Ludwig Priwin; April 6, 1929 – February 28, 2019)[1][2] was a German-American pianist, composer, and conductor.

In jazz, he was a celebrated trio pianist, a piano-accompanist to singers of standards, and pianist-interpreter of songs from the "Great American Songbook".

[3] 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.

Previn's father enrolled his son into the Conservatoire de Paris where André learned music theory.

[5] He learned English, which was his third language after German and French, through comic books and other reading materials with a dictionary, and watching films.

Previn's career as a composer, conductor, and arranger at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios (MGM) began in 1946, while he was still in high school, after their music department noticed his work for a local radio program and hired him.

"[1] 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.

[15] Beginning in 1951, while stationed with the Sixth Army Band at the Presidio of San Francisco, Previn took private conducting lessons for two years from Pierre Monteux, then conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, lessons which Previn valued highly.

[17] Previn stayed at MGM for 16 years, but despite the secure job and good pay, he had come to feel increasingly confined, and consequently desired to pursue classical music outside of film scores.

Nevertheless, 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.

Like Oscar Peterson, whom he admired tremendously,[20] and Bill Evans, he worked often as a trio pianist, usually with bass and drums, collaborating with dozens of famed jazz instrumentalists.

[...] 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.

[5] 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 Japan.

[29] 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.

[30] André Previn left two concert overtures, several tone poems, 14 concerti, a symphony for strings, incidental music to a British play; a varied body of chamber music (six violin sonatas, other scores for violin and piano; sonatas for bassoon, cello, clarinet, flute and oboe, each with piano; a waltz for two oboes and piano, three other trios, a string quartet with soprano, a clarinet quintet, a quintet for horn and strings, a nonet, an Octet for Eleven (for eleven players), and three works for brass ensemble); several works for solo piano; dozens of songs (in English and German); a monodrama for soprano, string quartet and piano (Penelope, completed just before he died); a musical each for New York and London (Coco and The Good Companions); and two successful operas.

[33] British TV audiences witnessed his comic acting skills when he was introduced as "Mr Andrew Preview" (or "Privet") 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.

[37][35] Previn recalled in 2005 that people in Britain still remember the sketch years later: "Taxi drivers still call me Mr Preview".

[38] 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".

[5] 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.

[57][58] 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.

Previn received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1998 in recognition of his contributions to classical music and opera in the United States.

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.

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 (beginning with Like Young: Secret Songs for Young Lovers, 1959, with David Rose and His Orchestra).

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 called "one of the greatest hours I ever saw on television"[71] – and Ella Fitzgerald (1979) respectively.

He favored the symphonic music of Berlioz, Brahms and Strauss, and placed a special emphasis on violin and piano concertos and on ballets.

[citation needed] Only a few of his recordings were of music before Haydn and Mozart (both favourites on his programmes) or of atonal or serial avant-garde pieces.

[citation needed] 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.