Print
Email
Share
If Andre Previn’s life passed before your eyes, the view would be so varied, romantic, and stuffed with music great and otherwise, you’d need sunglasses.
An odd thought, but one that surfaced the other day in Previn’s hotel room - after his first rehearsal in 14 years with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which he guest conducts this week - when he recalled the day he might have died. Decades ago, he was on tour with the Houston Symphony Orchestra to back up the aging, now legendary Sir John Barbirolli.
“We hit a storm and I really wondered if we were going to get out of this. The plane was taking leaps and falls,” Previn says. “And old Barbirolli sat there and said, ‘Oh it’s too awful! I haven’t even done all the Bruckners!’”
What would Previn say?
Taking a quick backward look, the 79-year-old musician is predictably grateful for all that has come his way - including music directorships of six orchestras from Pittsburgh to Oslo, as well as four Oscars for film work in Hollywood - even while asserting that he worked hard for it, with the mileage starting to show.
Previn has much trouble getting around, and even apologized to the Philadelphia Orchestra for how long he needed to walk on and off stage. He says he has cut his conducting engagements, and he no longer claims to be a jazz pianist because he doesn’t play that often. He grouses about the circulatory problem that’s slowing him down: “I may pretend from time to time that I’m still 30, but I’m not.”
Then you realize that he has three jazz gigs this year, is happy to double as piano soloist and conductor with the Philadelphia Orchestra this week, and has the kind of engagement book most full-time composers dream of. In celebration of his 80th birthday on Monday, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Yuri Bashmet will premiere his “Concerto for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra” at Carnegie Hall on April 26, while five days later, his operatic adaptation of the film “Brief Encounter” (he finished the last aria this week) will be premiered by the Houston Grand Opera.
In truth, he may still be only 78: The Berlin-born Previn emigrated with his parents from Nazi Germany in the dead of night in 1939, alighted in France for a while, and ultimately settled in Los Angeles. No wonder his birth certificate can’t be found. “It’s always been an argument, and by now I don’t care anymore,” he says.
What anybody makes of him seems to be of less concern to Previn today. Virtually no subject of conversation is off-limits. Anecdotes and opinions can be breathtakingly impolitic. He turned down Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande” because the production was reset in the Vietnam War. Reminded of his pop-music past with Doris Day on the now-classic 1961 album “Duet,” he says: “She was a strange lady. Whew! Strange foibles. ‘No black shirts in here, please!’”
Last year, he suggested in an interview that pianist Lang Lang, with his ultraphysical stage manner, take up juggling. He recalls going out with soprano Renee Fleming to see a new work at the Metropolitan Opera and says both disliked it so much that Fleming bailed at intermission. Without much process of elimination, you realize he’s trashing “The First Emperor,” by Tan Dun: “All of this makes me sound hopelessly old-fashioned ...”
Well, he is - in enviable ways.
Previn is one of the few remaining musicians trained in the great pre-World War II German tradition, though at a young age. He made his name with the London Symphony Orchestra (1968-79) in an era when he could phone up a recording company to say that thus-and-such a piece was shaping up well - and have it recorded that very week. “Now, you have to plan two years in advance and get approval from everybody but the pope,” he says.
Old-fashioned or not, he knows no sentimentality. He could spin you a fine tale about how his five divorces qualify him to dramatize the tale of thwarted love in “Brief Encounter” - about illicit romance between two respectable married people. In truth, Previn’s romantic, post-Korngold style of composition demands such subject matter. “When I find a story where I think it could touch an audience that might not particularly want to hear ‘Nixon in China,’ I leap for it,” he says.
Speaking of thwarted love, he doesn’t avoid the topic of violinist Mutter, his latest wife. They split in 2006, but he loves talking about her: “It’s a classic case of two simultaneous careers, both successful, both traveling, and we both have kids (from previous relationships). It was too many problems. She’s my very closest friend and I’m hers. If she’s in Beijing and I’m in New Rochelle, we find a way to call each other every single day.”
He owes the existence of his newest opera to her. Negotiations over the rights to the Alessandro Baricco novel “Silk” had collapsed when, one night, these two musical titans were at home watching TV (hard to picture, but true). “Brief Encounter” came on; Mutter hadn’t seen it.
“And I said, ‘Sit down and I’ll make some tea,’ and two hours later she was in a flood of tears saying, ‘You have to do something with this!’ I went into the kitchen and called John Caird (his librettist and co-director of “Les Miserables”) and said, ‘Brief Encounter.’ He said, ‘That’s a killer.’”
He cherishes Mutter so much, you wonder if he could ever marry anybody else. “I’ve been married,” he says quietly, referring to a succession of wives that have included actress Mia Farrow and singer/songwriter Dory Previn. “No, that’s it. Anna-Sophie was the last word for me.”
Getting old alone doesn’t thrill him, “especially around 4 in the morning. You suddenly think, ‘Who would even know?’ They’d find me in a week or something,” he says. “But I don’t think about that too much. I have waves of self-pity, but not too much.”
In other relationships, he has turned another page: Though he was chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic as recently as 2006, he sees no more music directorships in his future. He’s starting a principal-conductor association with Japan’s NHK Symphony Orchestra, but it won’t be heavy lifting.
Operas are a top priority. He gave up on “A Man for All Seasons” but is keen on some Henry James stories. His conducting repertoire is evolving toward special-occasion programs, such as all six Mozart symphonies over two concerts in Germany. He’s conducting the current German composer Wolfgang Rihm and adores Bruckner - who bored him 20 years ago.
“I’m in a puddle when I hear a good performance of a Bruckner symphony,” he says. “I heard Hans Graf do a wonderful performance of the Seventh. I was floored!”
So if his airplane were going down in a storm today, Previn says his dying exclamation would probably echo Barbirolli’s “I haven’t done all the Bruckners!”
