Off Topic R.I.P. February 2019

My interview with André Previn began very badly. His publicist had muddled up the time of our meeting, and I rang up to his hotel room in Knightsbridge a whole hour too early. Previn was in town to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra and his ex-wife, violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, the soloist in Brahms’ Violin Concerto was with him. “You want to do an interview? You just woke me up!” he snarled down the receiver. I apologised, and he said he’d see me in 15 minutes.

When he arrived, hair uncombed and hobbling on a walking stick – “it’s not an affectation, I really do need it,” he said – grumpiness was etched into every pore. We sat in the bar, and things went from bad to worse. A waitress brought him the wrong drink; and a fan hoping for an autograph went away empty-handed. And my first question, about how Previn’s background as an émigré Jew had informed his work, tanked. “Nothing to say about that. Next!”

But I was aware of his history. The man sitting next to me had worked with Ralph Vaughan Williams and Olivier Messiaen; with Oscar Peterson and Ravi Shankar; had scored the film version of My Fair Lady, for which he won one of his four Oscars. He had recorded Shostakovich with Leonard Bernstein and Peter Maxwell Davies with Isaac Stern – and had been famously slapped on the cheeks by Eric Morecambe as Ernie Wise looked on in mock horror. I had to get this man to talk.

And gradually – very gradually – he began to warm up. Born Andreas Ludwig Priwin on 6 April 1929, his family relocated to Los Angeles in 1941. By 1946, the young Previn was working for MGM Studios as an arranger, composer and occasional conductor. “I can’t pretend it was an awful life,” he reflected. “They hired me because I could do the work and I was cheap. The sun always shone; but for my ambitions it was a dead-end street.”

Previn explained that nobody was ever precious: “‘Here’s the movie, here’s the scene’, just go away and write the score. I got to conduct my own music for the first time, and I learned how to rehearse very fast, because the musicians were incredible. Even if the music was garbage, it was always played very well.”

French conductor Pierre Monteux – famous for leading the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913 – took him under his wing, and soon enough, ambition led Previn towards conducting classical repertoire. “Monteux came to a very early concert of mine,” Previn recalled. “‘Do you think the orchestra played well?’ he asked me after the concert. I nodded. ‘Me too,’ he said, ‘so next time keep out of their way’.”

That matter-of-fact professionalism, drilled into Previn during his time in Hollywood, never went away. Not for him the neurosis of tonality versus atonality that kept Bernstein awake all night, or the ideological spats provoked by Pierre Boulez. Previn wanted to make the music work – for it to sound as brilliant, as lyrical or as sonorously rich as the composer intended.

That record we made with Ravi Shankar was absolute, total, utter ****

We talked through his groundbreaking 1977 recording of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie with the LSO, and how, when he first performed the piece with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the musicians had loathed it. “‘What kind of rubbish is this?’ some players asked me, but the LSO came to like it – they were proud of themselves for managing it.”

Previn’s period as principal conductor of the LSO, between 1968 and 79, was a golden era indeed for the orchestra, but not everything went to plan. “That record wemade with Ravi Shankar was absolute, total, utter ****,” he said “When we got to the recording the studio was crammed full of incense sticks and Shankar was embarrassed because he hadn’t orchestrated it. Somehow we made the record, but I knew it was nonsense. Later, I heard Shankar talking on the radio, and he said it hadn’t been such a wonderful experience. ‘Good for you,’ I thought – it wasn’t so great for me, either.”

I asked about composers he enjoyed performing. “Mozart – it’s always been Mozart,” while of his recordings, he said: “I remain extraordinarily proud of the Vaughan Williams symphonies I recorded with the LSO, and in the 1980s and 90s I made an almost complete cycle of orchestral works by Richard Strauss with the Vienna Philharmonic. That was a source of pride for me because that’s really their music.”

Another drink, and I ask Previn about his work as a jazz pianist, styled after Art Tatum and Peterson. Did he consider jazz a parallel career to his classical work? “I remember reading an interview with Van Cliburn – who was indeed a very great pianist – and he said that he might try to play some jazz ‘next year’, and I thought, ‘Oh really?’ That infuriated me. I don’t want to consider jazz something you do once in a while.”

Minimalism is a kind of mean music, I prefer a lush sound

By now Previn was gregarious, even jolly. The discussion turned to minimalism – “It’s kind of mean music, I prefer a lush sound,” – and a conversation he’d once had with Boulez (“a brilliant man”) about how electronic music could give every note computer-like precision, and from Boulez we moved seamlessly to Morecambe & Wise. I told Previn that my favourite line of the sketch – which sent up Eric’s efforts to play the Grieg Piano Concerto – was “for another fiver we could have had Ted Heath”. Previn’s face creased with mirth, and I was pleased to see that the sketch meant as much to him as everybody else. “Eric was very worried that I wasn’t a comedian. He said, ‘If anyone thinks we’re trying to be funny, we’re finished. We must act as though it’s very serious.’ The sketch was scheduled at about five minutes, but when we did it on air it was nearer 10. Eric added bits as he went, like when he slapped my face. To this day, whenever I walk down a street in London someone will shout, ‘Hey, Mr Preview.’ Every single bloody time.”

 

The music he wrote for Irma La Douce is arguably one of the best soundtracks ever.