Juggler of the Keyboard

"Impatience gnaws at me once in a while," says Hollywood Composer Andre Previn. "I don't think I'll ever go as far as I want to go.'' The remark falls somewhat strangely from his lips. A musical director at M-G-M when he was barely 19, Previn has since juggled the careers of arranger, composer, conductor, concert pianist and jazzman, and kept each in the air without missing a beat.

During the past two weeks, Previn was planning two new jazz albums and an album of chamber music; he was also rehearsing Rachmaninoff's Paganini Variations for a concert with the Los Angeles Symphony, discussing the scores for three new pictures, writing an arrangement for Ella Fitzgerald of a song he has written (called Yes), and rehearsing (in New York City) for an appearance with Benny Goodman on TV's Swing into Spring. In Hollywood he barely had time to drop in at the Pantages Theater on his thirtieth birthday to collect a glittering memento of his most recent success: an Oscar (see SHOW BUSINESS) for his scoring of the musical Gigi.

Previn's hectic career is sometimes likened to Leonard Bernstein's, a comparison he modestly rejects. The record, though, is of a Jack-of-all-musical-trades, and a master of many. In ten years he has worked on something like 30 films, composing, arranging, orchestrating and conducting quite a few entirely on his own, including It's Always Fair Weather and Bad Day at Black Rock. By "cheating every minute," he has managed to turn out a symphony and a quantity of piano works and chamber music. As a concert pianist, he admires the moderns--Copland, Barber. Prokofiev, Hindemith, Bartok--but he has also recorded all the four-hand piano music of Mozart, with his good friend Composer Lukas Foss. His jazz manner is all his own: a fanciful, highly individualistic style, characterized by kaleidoscopic rhythmic shifts, trip-hammered treble runs and a discreetly swinging left hand punctuated by sudden stops and breaks. He heads a combo that performs occasionally in dedicated jazz rooms, and with famed West Coast Drummer Shelly Manne, he has recorded a number of highly imaginative jazz albums for Contemporary records.

The son of a onetime Berlin lawyer who now teaches piano, Previn arrived in the U.S. when he was nine, studied piano in high school, was hired, even before he graduated, by M-G-M to arrange the boogie-woogie pieces for Jose Iturbi's Holiday in Mexico. Lately, Previn has been feeling the burdens of age, sharpened by a desire to compose more serious music: "You can't write it in Hollywood. I've had ten years there, and I don't want to look back at myself on my 50th birthday and know I haven't tried." But he would never be happy, he confesses, cutting himself off entirely from Hollywood. There is far more to music. Composer Previn earnestly believes, "than sitting around writing string quartets for League of Composers concerts."

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