Composer and conductor

Born: April 6, 1929

Died: February 28, 2019

André Previn, who has died aged 89, was a versatile musician who straddled the worlds of classical music, jazz, musicals and film scores; he was a fine pianist and arranger, the principal conductor of several orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra (1968-79) and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (1985-88), won four Oscars and 11 Grammys (including one for lifetime achievement), composed across genres and married a string of glamorous women.

In Britain, where he lived for most of the 1970s, he was a regular on television chat and panel shows and had his own programme, Music Night, but he was almost certainly best-known to a mass audience for one brief appearance on Morecambe & Wise’s Christmas special in 1971. The comedians’ shows were an institution, which regularly attracted half the population as viewers, and Previn featured in what became one of their most popular sketches.

In it, Previn (introduced as Mr Andrew Preview) played a conductor who has to contend with Eric Morecambe’s inept pianist, booked to play Grieg’s Piano Concerto with an orchestra. Previn, who had learnt his lines in a taxi on the way to the recording, deadpanned perfectly against Morecambe’s floundering incompetence and bizarre demands, before exploding with the line: “You’re playing all the wrong notes!”

“I’m playing all the right notes,” came the immortal reply. “But not necessarily in the right order.” The popularity of the sketch, which led to a couple of subsequent guest appearances with the pair, Previn claimed, had brought him an entirely new level of fame; his local pub, near Dorking, had even supplied him with his own reserved pint glass.

He was born Andreas Ludwig Priwin in Berlin, on April 6 1929, and showed exceptional musical promise from an early age, joining the Berlin conservatory at six. But his Jewish father moved the family to escape the Nazis, first in 1938 to Paris, and then to Los Angeles, where André continued his studies with the composer Ernst Toch, taking American citizenship in 1943.

While still at school, he began working on music for Hollywood studios, after he was asked to help out on the 1946 MGM musical Holiday in Mexico, which called for the Spanish concert pianist José Iturbi to play some jazz. Previn wrote out a transcription of a solo from a jam session so that he did not have to improvise. Impressed, MGM hired him to produce the score for the Lassie picture, The Sun Comes Up (1949).

The following year, Previn was drafted into the Army, where he served with the Sixth Army Band, which was stationed in San Francisco, and where he also took conducting classes with Pierre Monteux, whom he was later to succeed at the LSO. He then spent a decade under contract at MGM, which he later said was looking for someone “talented, fast and cheap, and because I was a kid, I was all three”.

He eventually scored, or was arranger and musical director on, some 50 films, and notched up 11 Academy Award nominations (including an unprecedented three in one year, 1961). He won four: for Gigi (1959); Porgy and Bess (1960); Irma La Douce (1964) and My Fair Lady (1965). Those were adaptations, but he provided fine original music for many others, of which some of the most notable were Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), The Subterraneans and Elmer Gantry (both 1960), Two for the Seesaw (1962) and Rollerball (1975), the last of which featured electronic versions of Bach and original jazzy, psychedelic dance music.

Previn had played jazz, usually with a trio, since the 1950s, winning Grammys for his recordings in the early 1960s, one of them for a recording of songs from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.

Comparisons with Bernstein, who also worked as a classical conductor, jazz pianist, Broadway composer and populariser of music, and had a similarly glamorous public profile, were inevitable, but Previn chose to acknowledge his gratitude that Bernstein had made it possible to work across a range of forms. His work in jazz was admired by such giants of the field as Dizzy Gillespie, but Previn himself claimed not to be a jazz musician, “but a musician who occasionally plays jazz”.

In 1967, he became musical director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra and the following year was a surprise appointment as principal conductor of the LSO where, during his tenure, it was described as having “acquired an American accent” and where one critic produced the mixed verdict on Previn as “a first-rate conductor of second-rate music”.

In 1969, he wrote (with the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner), the Broadway musical Coco, based on Coco Chanel and starring Katharine Hepburn, which ran for a year. In 1974, London staged his musical The Good Companions, with book by Ronald Harwood and lyrics by Johnny Mercer and based on JB Priestley’s novel, which ran for the best part of a year.

From 1976, he combined his duties at the LSO with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, where he was musical director until 1984. He then took the baton at the RPO in London, and at the same time served as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (1985-1989). He wrote the music for Tom Stoppard’s play about Soviet dissidents, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (starring Ian McKellen, John Wood and Patrick Stewart and staged at the Royal Festival Hall, 1977), which was also televised the following year, and featured the LSO on stage.

Through the 1990s, he continued to produce a stream of jazz recordings as bandleader or pianist, and classical recordings as conductor. He also wrote a gossipy, entertaining memoir, No Minor Chords (1991). He was appointed an Honorary KBE in 1996.

In 1998, he wrote his first opera, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, which featured Renée Fleming and the San Francisco Opera. A second opera, an adaptation of Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter, was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera, and premiered in Texas in 2009.

André Previn was married and divorced five times. With his first wife, the singer Betty Bennett (1952-57), he had two daughters. From 1959-1969, he was married to the singer-songwriter Dory Langan, who later produced songs based on her mental breakdown and Previn’s affair with the actress Mia Farrow (then married to Frank Sinatra), which led to the failure of the marriage. After their respective divorces and his marriage to Mia Farrow in 1970, the couple had three children and adopted a further three, one of whom, Soon-Yi, married in 1997 the film director Woody Allen, who had until then in been in a relationship with Farrow.

Previn and Farrow had divorced in 1979 and in 1982, he married Heather Sneddon, with whom he had an adopted daughter and a son; they were divorced in 1999.

In 2002, he married the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and moved for a while to the country of his birth. They divorced in 2006 but remained close friends and collaborated on musical projects (he had written a Violin Concerto for her in 1999).

Previn died at his home in Manhattan on February 28.

ANDREW McKIE