Monday, 11 March 2019
Sunday, 10 March 2019
Saturday, 9 March 2019
Jacques Loussier RIP
French pianist and composer who applied jazz improvisation and swing to Bach’s exquisite symmetries
John Fordham
The Guardian
Thu 7 Mar 2019
These days music lovers are inclined to disregard the rusty sectarianisms that used to keep genres apart, with elite art supposedly towering over scruffy popular entertainment. But during the early career of Jacques Loussier, the multimillion-selling, eclectic French pianist/composer, who has died aged 84, the rules were very different.
When Loussier began applying jazz improvisation and swing to Johann Sebastian Bach’s exquisite symmetries, some jazz pundits and fans dismissed it as a betrayal of an African-American music’s expressive earthiness and blues roots, aimed at an audience that preferred its jazz pretty rather than passionate. And from the classical angle, observers were liable to perceive the young Frenchman’s work as little short of vandalism.
The New York Times critic John Rockwell’s review of a Loussier concert at Carnegie Hall in 1975 reflected that distaste when he proclaimed: “There is a certain sort of sensibility that is actively appalled by the very notion of ‘popularising’ Bach – or any classical composer, for that matter. This listener’s sensibility is one of those, and so he found the Tuesday evening performance at a sparsely attended Carnegie Hall by the Jacques Loussier Trio tiresome and offensive.”
Nonetheless, the success of concerts and recordings by Loussier and his Play Bach trio (originally formed with the eminent Paris jazz sidemen Pierre Michelot on bass and Christian Garros on drums) took off almost overnight from the group’s first appearances in 1959 – shifting millions of Play Bach recordings in the almost two-decade life of the original band.
Thu 7 Mar 2019
These days music lovers are inclined to disregard the rusty sectarianisms that used to keep genres apart, with elite art supposedly towering over scruffy popular entertainment. But during the early career of Jacques Loussier, the multimillion-selling, eclectic French pianist/composer, who has died aged 84, the rules were very different.
When Loussier began applying jazz improvisation and swing to Johann Sebastian Bach’s exquisite symmetries, some jazz pundits and fans dismissed it as a betrayal of an African-American music’s expressive earthiness and blues roots, aimed at an audience that preferred its jazz pretty rather than passionate. And from the classical angle, observers were liable to perceive the young Frenchman’s work as little short of vandalism.
The New York Times critic John Rockwell’s review of a Loussier concert at Carnegie Hall in 1975 reflected that distaste when he proclaimed: “There is a certain sort of sensibility that is actively appalled by the very notion of ‘popularising’ Bach – or any classical composer, for that matter. This listener’s sensibility is one of those, and so he found the Tuesday evening performance at a sparsely attended Carnegie Hall by the Jacques Loussier Trio tiresome and offensive.”
Nonetheless, the success of concerts and recordings by Loussier and his Play Bach trio (originally formed with the eminent Paris jazz sidemen Pierre Michelot on bass and Christian Garros on drums) took off almost overnight from the group’s first appearances in 1959 – shifting millions of Play Bach recordings in the almost two-decade life of the original band.
The group’s suitably chilled-out, languidly hip treatment of Bach’s Air on the G String famously accompanied the Hamlet cigar company’s TV advertising from 1962, with cinema versions finally being banned at the end of the century, though these soundtracks did not include Michelot’s subsequent driving bass-walk and Loussier’s freewheeling improv theme-stretches.
Loussier, however, was no one-trick populist who had chanced on a hit formula and milked it. A piano virtuoso from early childhood, he attended the Conservatoire National de Musique in Paris from his mid-teens under a celebrated mentor – the classical pianist and educator Yves Nat – travelled in the Middle East and Latin America absorbing musical ideas in his early 20s, and composed scores for more than 60 films and TV shows. There was also the tireless touring of the Play Bach trio – and after its breakup, he worked on both acoustic and electronic projects at his own Studio Miraval in Provence.
Born in Angers, in western France, Loussier began piano lessons at the age of 10, and within a year was fascinated by the music of Bach. When he heard a piece from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena at 11, he took to playing it incessantly. “I was studying this piece and I just fell in love with it,” Loussier told an interviewer in 2003. “Then I found I loved to play the music, but add my own notes, expanding the harmonies and playing around with that music.”
In this, as Loussier was later to observe, he was not subverting Bach but paying his respects to an improvising tradition to which the composer also belonged, even if classical music’s subsequent assumptions preferred to bury that unruly element.
Loussier’s potential had been brought to Nat’s attention when he was 13, and Nat supplied him with practice projects that the boy would visit Paris every three months to demonstrate. At 16 he entered the conservatoire, financing his courses by playing jazz in the city’s bars.
In the mid-1950s Loussier then took off on his travels, which included Cuba, where he stayed for a year. Back home, he found work as an accompanist, to the singer and actor Catherine Sauvage and Charles Aznavour.
Loussier later recalled that in 1959 he had told Decca Records that he was a classical pianist and they said they already had plenty. Then he said he was a jazz pianist and they said they had plenty of those, too. “Finally I started to play some Bach with my improvisations and they said, ‘What is that? Why don’t we make a record of that?’ I was still doing it out of fun. I never thought the public would like it. I was wrong.”
With Michelot and Garros, and with the American chamber-musical Modern Jazz Quartet as a significant and celebrated inspiration, the Play Bach trio made four hugely successful Decca albums between 1960 and 1963, launched a performance schedule rarely numbering fewer than 150 shows a year worldwide, and expanded the repertoire to include double-tracked recordings of Loussier parts on organ and piano, and arrangements of Bach concertos.
In the midst of it all, Loussier was also a sought-after composer for film and TV. In 1978, weary of travelling, he wound the trio up and retired to Studio Miraval to explore composition more deeply, experiment with electronics and studio techniques, and play host and offer recording time to visiting rock stars including Pink Floyd, AC/DC and Sade.
He wrote the full-scale symphony Lumières (with the countertenor James Bowman, soprano Deborah Rees and a rock rhythm section on its Paris premiere), concertos for trumpet and violin, strings suites, a ballet score and the crossover fusion works Pulsion, Pagan Moon, and Pulsion Sous la Mer.
But Bach’s 1985 tercentenary had already tempted Loussier back to the piano stool. With the jazz/classical bassist Vincent Charbonnier, followed after illness in the 90s by the comparably virtuosic Benoit Dunoyer de Segonzac and the percussionist André Arpino, Loussier formed a more broadminded, genre-fluid and technically sophisticated version of the Play Bach trio, which if anything amplified just how creatively musical his original vision had been.
Recording for Telarc from 1996, Loussier returned to his beloved Bach, explored Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in improv conversations with Charbonnier and Arpino, with an affectionate nod to the Modern Jazz Quartet’s Django (1997), and Satie, with De Segonzac and Arpino (1998).
Interpretations of Ravel, Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin followed (with the last-named occasioning Loussier’s first solo piano album in his 70th birthday year, on which he breezily threw flamenco, gospel, calypso and stride-piano into the mix), and ambitious Bach homages taking on the Goldberg Variations and the Brandenburg Concertos.
In 2002, the pianist’s life took an unlikely turn when he embarked on a lawsuit against the rapper Eminem for allegedly stealing hooks from Pulsion for the track Kill You from the Marshall Mathers LP – a confrontation eventually settled out of court. In a conversation that year with the writer Sholto Byrnes, Loussier seemed mainly miffed that the Americans had not asked him first, and typically claimed: “I like good music whatever it is.” He later registered an interest in Eminem’s music.
Jazz reference books have not been so generous to Loussier, but, a true jazz improviser rather than an embellisher of the classics, he sidelined the snobberies from both sides in his early years. He paid tribute to the composers he loved with unmistakable and expert devotion, performing long enough to see his inclusive vision of a music with far fewer borders come to pass.
He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, and five children.
• Jacques Loussier, pianist, born 26 October 1934; died 5 March 2019
Friday, 8 March 2019
Wednesday night's set lists at The Habit, York
Da Elderly (1): -
I'm Just A Loser
You've Got A Friend
Southern Man
Da Elderly (2): -
I Don't Want To Talk About It
I'm So Tired
Ron is on holiday.
It was another mostly quiet night, getting much busier later. There were few players to start with, so each was allotted 3 songs. As the evening wore on, several late-comers took to the mic and things moved along nicely, but even so, we ran out of acts by around 11pm. We started where we began with anyone who wanted to play again getting the opportunity. The last hour flew by and a splendid time was had by all.
I'm Just A Loser
You've Got A Friend
Southern Man
Da Elderly (2): -
I Don't Want To Talk About It
I'm So Tired
Ron is on holiday.
It was another mostly quiet night, getting much busier later. There were few players to start with, so each was allotted 3 songs. As the evening wore on, several late-comers took to the mic and things moved along nicely, but even so, we ran out of acts by around 11pm. We started where we began with anyone who wanted to play again getting the opportunity. The last hour flew by and a splendid time was had by all.
Tuesday, 5 March 2019
Monday, 4 March 2019
Sunday, 3 March 2019
Don McCullin at Tate Britain 2019
Don McCullin review – witness for the persecuted
Tate Britain, London
This retrospective of the veteran photographer’s images of war, poverty and atrocity shines light on the unconscionable. It’s almost overwhelming
Adrian Searle
A Nikon camera body with bullet hole at Don McCullin, Tate Britain. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas
Tate Britain, London
This retrospective of the veteran photographer’s images of war, poverty and atrocity shines light on the unconscionable. It’s almost overwhelming
Adrian Searle
The Guardian
Mon 4 Feb 2019
Here is the camera that took a bullet instead of its owner. The military helmet and the light meter, passports and compass, all in a vitrine. Here is the American soldier, traumatised, staring back. Here are the villagers, displaced. Here are the living and here are the dead. Here are things I prefer not to describe.
Mon 4 Feb 2019
Here is the camera that took a bullet instead of its owner. The military helmet and the light meter, passports and compass, all in a vitrine. Here is the American soldier, traumatised, staring back. Here are the villagers, displaced. Here are the living and here are the dead. Here are things I prefer not to describe.
Cyprus, 1964
There are too many photographs in Don McCullin’s retrospective at Tate Britain. Room after room, on grey wall after grey wall, they keep on coming. These framed, mostly black and white images are a journey through the world and through the photographer’s life. Now 83, McCullin is a man who has seen too much and borne witness to too much. The too many and the too much are part of the point of this engrossing and demanding exhibition.
US marines, the Citadel, Hue, Vietnam, 1968
“Yo lo vi” – I saw it – wrote Goya, beside an image of people fleeing before advancing French troops, in one of the prints in his Disasters of War suite of etchings, made around 200 years ago. “And this as well,” he wrote, beside the subsequent image. Goya’s declarations might not always tell the literal truth of what he saw with his own eyes, but no such doubts accompany McCullin’s photographs.
There are too many photographs in Don McCullin’s retrospective at Tate Britain. Room after room, on grey wall after grey wall, they keep on coming. These framed, mostly black and white images are a journey through the world and through the photographer’s life. Now 83, McCullin is a man who has seen too much and borne witness to too much. The too many and the too much are part of the point of this engrossing and demanding exhibition.
US marines, the Citadel, Hue, Vietnam, 1968
“Yo lo vi” – I saw it – wrote Goya, beside an image of people fleeing before advancing French troops, in one of the prints in his Disasters of War suite of etchings, made around 200 years ago. “And this as well,” he wrote, beside the subsequent image. Goya’s declarations might not always tell the literal truth of what he saw with his own eyes, but no such doubts accompany McCullin’s photographs.
He was there, as the Berlin Wall went up, on the streets of Limassol during the Cyprus civil war, in the Bogside and in Stanleyville, Biafra and Vietnam. He was there with the lone gunman, crouching alert on the floor of the wrecked lobby of the Holiday Inn in Beirut. He was there with the corpse of the Congolese man, his brains shot out beside his bicycle.
People of the Karo tribe, 2004
He was also there when the woman, the very picture of a middle-class housewife, smiled back at his camera, as she was bundled away by the police at a Ban the Bomb protest at Aldermaston in the early 1960s. He also saw the homeless men asleep while standing, hands in pockets, heads lowered like horses, in Whitechapel in 1970. Disaster is so often close to home, in squalid rooms in Bradford, on East End doorsteps, in Toxteth and in Wigan.
A Palestinian mother in her destroyed house, Sabra Camp, 1982
There are so many great and terrible images here. I snatch at fragments – the kid in the Finsbury park youth club, the gawping blokes with their beers in the stripper pub, the big northern woman queuing with a shiny new shovel in her hand, like the latest accessory. Small consolations and momentary pleasures, along with death and starvation, misery and fear, remind us of a different everyday. Fishermen kick a football about on a Scarborough beach, the sky about to open on a moment of sun. The metal mirror of a Somerset dew pond, round as a plate. A knobbly knees contest in Southend-on-Sea. Then we are back, staring at collapsed staircases, like exposed entrails, spilling from a bombed apartment block in Homs, Syria, and with a man dying of Aids in Zimbabwe.
Near Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, 1962
In these unrelenting scenes of trespass and tragedy we are left facing our own voyeurism, an increasing inability to process the mounting horrors. McCullin revisits his own work over and over again, as he prints and reprints his images in his darkroom, repeatedly trying to tease the best from his negatives. His returns to these images cannot be entirely healthy. Unless, that is, they inoculate him against their unconscionable power, both as images and as memories. The words “negatives” and “processing” have rarely felt so freighted.
Suspected Lumumbist freedom fighters being tormented before execution, Stanleyville, 1964
Many of McCullin’s photographs demand a long, strong look. Others we might want to swerve away from almost at the moment of recognition, only needing to see them once. They are already fixed in the developing fluid of the subconscious. Many of us of a certain age will have first encountered McCullin’s photographs by chance through the 1960s and 70s, in the Observer, in the Sunday Times Magazine. Many have been stirring around in my head for most of my life, irreducible and unforgettable.
Catholic youths attacking British soldiers in the Bogside of Londonderry, 1971
McCullin’s images brought the Vietnam war, starvation in Biafra, civil wars, post-colonial and nearer-to-home sectarian conflicts in Derry and Belfast, into our houses and into our heads in a way that television coverage never could.
Early shift, West Hartlepool Steelworks, County Durham, 1963
Sometimes McCullin had to walk away. Sometimes I had to walk away from certain images, too. After a few rooms, I had to take a break from the grieving and the corpses, the starving and the terrified. Our hunger for images may be insatiable, but it becomes hard to concentrate and to give each image, taken at who knows what cost, its due.
Strange Travellers: a destitute Tibetan family in the booking hall of railways station at dawn, Delhi, 1965
There is a visceral quality to McCullin’s photographs, in their analogue tonalities, the depth of their blacks and greys, the clarities and dimming of their whites, their strong and weak light, their focus, their attendance on the unconscionable. His insistence on black and white seems to lend his photographs an extra veracity, a sullen, stark truthfulness, stripped of any glamour. McCullin did more than record, even though the situations in which he frequently found himself necessitated instantaneous responses, before the mind with its mortal fear and terror, disgust, moral outrage and doubt, empathy, self-justification, self hate, all the qualms, had a chance to kick in.
Photography, he has said, chose him. The exhilaration of danger and the sound of gunfire found him, as much as he sought it out over his long career. Conflict was always round the corner for McCullin, even growing up in low-ceilinged rooms and poverty in Finsbury Park. Down the road, a man shepherds a flock to an abattoir through a grim north London dawn.
Homeless Irishman, Spitalfields, London, 1970
Where the homeless stood around reeking fires of rubbish in Spitalfields market half a century ago, they sleep in corporate doorways now. The wars continue. There is no end to the poverty, nor to the atrocities. Looking away is not an option.
Consett, County Durham, 1974
At Tate Britain, London, from 5 February to 6 May.
Saturday, 2 March 2019
André Previn RIP
André Previn obituary
Charismatic conductor, composer and pianist renowned as one of the most versatile musicians of his generationDavid Patrick Stearns
The Guardian
Thu 28 Feb 2019
The conductor, composer and pianist André Previn, who has died aged 89, was not only among the most charismatic performers of his day, but also enjoyed one of the greatest classical-music lives since Berlioz and Liszt – and one that did not grow less eventful with old age. His pedigree was unique: no other Oscar-winning conductor-composer from the Hollywood film studios became equally successful in the strictly classical world of the London Symphony Orchestra – which Previn headed from 1968 to 1979 – while also maintaining a side career as a jazz pianist.
As a composer, his successes were singular in their range: from film scores such as that for the Oscar-nominated Elmer Gantry (1960) to stage musicals for the West End (The Good Companions, 1974) and Broadway (Coco, 1970) that were also hits. Later, he returned to composing after a dormant decade with a succession of song cycles, concertos and two major operas, A Streetcar Named Desire (1998) and Brief Encounter (2009), often in a style reaching back to his pre-second world war training in his native Berlin.
His adult years were divided between the east and west coasts of the US, as well as the UK, where he enjoyed particular celebrity status and received an honorary knighthood in 1996. “Those of you who think that being a conductor is a succession of limousines and mistresses – it isn’t. It’s being some place not long enough to have your laundry done and having to work it out,” Previn said in the Tony Palmer documentary film The Kindness of Strangers (1998). He often headed two orchestras simultaneously in separate continents, but whatever country he was in, he was a highly visible, celebrated presence, often hailed as the new guard of classical music – his humour, accessibility and articulate observational sense demystified his profession – even though his manner of music-making was mainstream, even conservative. Though critics considered Previn a middleweight talent during his London Symphony Orchestra years, his broadcast-friendly qualities expanded the orchestra’s audience through the TV show André Previn’s Music Night (1971-72), and, more indirectly, through the comic alter ego Andrew Preview he created with Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise. In the US, he brought the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to unprecedented national attention during his 1976-84 tenure thanks to the TV series Previn and the Pittsburgh (1977-80).
The son of Charlotte (nee Epstein) and Jacob Priwin, he was born Andreas Ludwig Priwin in Berlin, where his father was a successful lawyer. He received an old-world musical education and spent many evenings playing Beethoven symphonies in piano reductions with his father, who emigrated in 1939 with his family first to Paris and then to Los Angeles, which had become a haven for numerous talented German Jewish families fleeing the Nazi regime. The young Previn claimed to have learned English from viewing Hollywood films repeatedly. By the age of 16, he was shuttling from Beverly Hills high school to the film studios, where he worked as an arranger and, later, a composer.
Previn’s first publicly performed composition was a water ballet in the 1948 Esther Williams musical On An Island With You. His first full score was for a bizarre combination of stars – the dog Lassie and the soprano Jeanette MacDonald – in the film The Sun Comes Up (1949). Unlike young concert performers who take a year or two off their age, Previn added a year. While still a young man, he rose to the top of his profession, working on the most prestigious MGM musicals, though, as documented in his witty memoir of that period, No Minor Chords (1992), the job description sometimes extended well beyond music. While working on the now-classic Gigi (1958), he had to chase around France, where the film was being shot, to find a black swan demanded by the temperamental director Vincente Minnelli, only to be told his swan was not black enough. He won Oscars for his work on Gigi, Porgy and Bess (1959), Irma La Douce (1963) and My Fair Lady (1964).
During this time, Previn’s fascination with jazz led him to transcribe the keyboard improvisations of Art Tatum, note for note. The talent for improvisation that he developed from there took him in a variety of different directions, from spare, serious jazz trio records to more homogenised easy-listening albums. His improvisational extravagance is particularly apparent in the outtakes from his collaboration with Doris Day, an album entitled Duet (1962).
Previn’s break with Hollywood was not as clear and decisive as he often described. His formal conducting debut is generally set at 1963 with the St Louis Symphony, soon followed by his first appointment, as music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, a post he held from 1967 to 1969. However, Previn continued to have film credits, including Rollerball (1975), and his work during those years has a combination of high visibility and shocking unevenness – coinciding with the industry-wide decline of the film musical.
The popular but downmarket Valley of the Dolls (1967), for example, shows Previn and his second wife, the singer-songwriter Dory, at their best with the film’s lovely theme song, Theme to Valley of the Dolls, sung by Dionne Warwick. But Judy Garland rebelled against the clichéd I’ll Plant My Own Tree – which contributed to her departure from the film. In later years, Previn could only explain some of these embarrassing efforts by pleading youthful ignorance: he was doing the best with what he knew.
Subsequent to his Hollywood years, his main compositional effort was a collaboration with the playwright Tom Stoppard, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), which has enjoyed a steady stream of semi-staged concert performances with symphony orchestra since its premiere, including a 2009 National Theatre revival.
For years, Previn was known only as a conductor, his London Symphony Orchestra tenure setting the tone for his international reputation in later decades as “a first-rate conductor of second-rate music” (according to the critic Martin Bernheimer). His strongly score-based interpretive stance stemmed from a seminal moment he had early on: he received bad news just before going onstage and poured his sorrow into the symphony at hand, only to be told afterwards that the performance was interpretively incoherent. Thus, his music making had emotional dignity in his earlier years, but often a less satisfying sobriety in later ones.
His London Symphony recordings are often his best, and they are numerous, thanks to such a congenial relationship with EMI that he could phone the company to say that a certain concert was shaping up unusually well, and have a recording team on hand by the end of the week. He championed composers that non-British conductors would not touch at that time, such as Vaughan Williams and William Walton. His hallmark was Russian repertoire: Previn’s discography had more than 250 discs of Prokofiev, and more than 100 each by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. Most important was the first recording of the uncut version of the Rachmaninov Symphony No 2 in the early 1970s: it brought new respect for the symphony, prompting a positive re-evaluation of the composer’s music at large over the following decades.
Previn’s Pittsburgh tenure established further credentials in the French repertoire, and not just Debussy and Ravel. He went through an intensive period conducting Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie in the late 1970s, and is considered to have greatly aided its dissemination, even though the then radical piece was booed in Pittsburgh.
As time went on with the Royal Philharmonic (where he was principal conductor and chief conductor, 1985-92) critics began noticing a lack of fire in both performances and recordings. Previn’s subsequent return to the US west coast to lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic, starting in 1985 – which might have been the summit of his conducting career – ended in his stormy resignation in 1989. The orchestra’s general manager, Ernest Fleischmann, who was used to operating independently, offered a Japanese tour to the then little-known Esa-Pekka Salonen without consulting Previn – one of several slights that left the conductor categorically refusing to return to the orchestra, even with different management, as a guest.
Though he had short-term relationships as a guest conductor, Previn’s frequent visits to the Vienna Philharmonic were more artistically important, establishing him as a Mozart/Strauss specialist, doubling as soloist and conductor in a Mozart piano concerto followed by a Strauss tone poem. Even later, he became a Bruckner specialist. One of his best, and most overlooked, recording projects was a vigorous, insightful complete Beethoven symphony cycle with the Royal Philharmonic from the early 1990s.
Previn often took his pianistic abilities for granted, but they were prized in many circles, not so much for technical prowess as for the way his fingers revealed interpretive insights with great precision and specificity. His earlier recordings were included in the famous Philips-label Great Pianists of the 20th Century series. Some of his best later-in-life performances were in a piano trio he formed with the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter (his fifth wife) and the cellist Daniel Müller-Schott. Among his most irreverent anecdotes – there were many – was one about a performance of the Beethoven Triple Concerto in which he was the classical-minded piano soloist, Mstislav Rostropovich was the arch-romantic cellist and Yehudi Menuhin was the technically distressed violinist. As Previn recounted to BBC Music Magazine, the conductor, Leonard Bernstein, was appalled at how badly it all came out, while Menuhin claimed to have experienced something sublime.
Thu 28 Feb 2019
The conductor, composer and pianist André Previn, who has died aged 89, was not only among the most charismatic performers of his day, but also enjoyed one of the greatest classical-music lives since Berlioz and Liszt – and one that did not grow less eventful with old age. His pedigree was unique: no other Oscar-winning conductor-composer from the Hollywood film studios became equally successful in the strictly classical world of the London Symphony Orchestra – which Previn headed from 1968 to 1979 – while also maintaining a side career as a jazz pianist.
As a composer, his successes were singular in their range: from film scores such as that for the Oscar-nominated Elmer Gantry (1960) to stage musicals for the West End (The Good Companions, 1974) and Broadway (Coco, 1970) that were also hits. Later, he returned to composing after a dormant decade with a succession of song cycles, concertos and two major operas, A Streetcar Named Desire (1998) and Brief Encounter (2009), often in a style reaching back to his pre-second world war training in his native Berlin.
His adult years were divided between the east and west coasts of the US, as well as the UK, where he enjoyed particular celebrity status and received an honorary knighthood in 1996. “Those of you who think that being a conductor is a succession of limousines and mistresses – it isn’t. It’s being some place not long enough to have your laundry done and having to work it out,” Previn said in the Tony Palmer documentary film The Kindness of Strangers (1998). He often headed two orchestras simultaneously in separate continents, but whatever country he was in, he was a highly visible, celebrated presence, often hailed as the new guard of classical music – his humour, accessibility and articulate observational sense demystified his profession – even though his manner of music-making was mainstream, even conservative. Though critics considered Previn a middleweight talent during his London Symphony Orchestra years, his broadcast-friendly qualities expanded the orchestra’s audience through the TV show André Previn’s Music Night (1971-72), and, more indirectly, through the comic alter ego Andrew Preview he created with Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise. In the US, he brought the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to unprecedented national attention during his 1976-84 tenure thanks to the TV series Previn and the Pittsburgh (1977-80).
The son of Charlotte (nee Epstein) and Jacob Priwin, he was born Andreas Ludwig Priwin in Berlin, where his father was a successful lawyer. He received an old-world musical education and spent many evenings playing Beethoven symphonies in piano reductions with his father, who emigrated in 1939 with his family first to Paris and then to Los Angeles, which had become a haven for numerous talented German Jewish families fleeing the Nazi regime. The young Previn claimed to have learned English from viewing Hollywood films repeatedly. By the age of 16, he was shuttling from Beverly Hills high school to the film studios, where he worked as an arranger and, later, a composer.
Previn’s first publicly performed composition was a water ballet in the 1948 Esther Williams musical On An Island With You. His first full score was for a bizarre combination of stars – the dog Lassie and the soprano Jeanette MacDonald – in the film The Sun Comes Up (1949). Unlike young concert performers who take a year or two off their age, Previn added a year. While still a young man, he rose to the top of his profession, working on the most prestigious MGM musicals, though, as documented in his witty memoir of that period, No Minor Chords (1992), the job description sometimes extended well beyond music. While working on the now-classic Gigi (1958), he had to chase around France, where the film was being shot, to find a black swan demanded by the temperamental director Vincente Minnelli, only to be told his swan was not black enough. He won Oscars for his work on Gigi, Porgy and Bess (1959), Irma La Douce (1963) and My Fair Lady (1964).
During this time, Previn’s fascination with jazz led him to transcribe the keyboard improvisations of Art Tatum, note for note. The talent for improvisation that he developed from there took him in a variety of different directions, from spare, serious jazz trio records to more homogenised easy-listening albums. His improvisational extravagance is particularly apparent in the outtakes from his collaboration with Doris Day, an album entitled Duet (1962).
Previn’s break with Hollywood was not as clear and decisive as he often described. His formal conducting debut is generally set at 1963 with the St Louis Symphony, soon followed by his first appointment, as music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, a post he held from 1967 to 1969. However, Previn continued to have film credits, including Rollerball (1975), and his work during those years has a combination of high visibility and shocking unevenness – coinciding with the industry-wide decline of the film musical.
The popular but downmarket Valley of the Dolls (1967), for example, shows Previn and his second wife, the singer-songwriter Dory, at their best with the film’s lovely theme song, Theme to Valley of the Dolls, sung by Dionne Warwick. But Judy Garland rebelled against the clichéd I’ll Plant My Own Tree – which contributed to her departure from the film. In later years, Previn could only explain some of these embarrassing efforts by pleading youthful ignorance: he was doing the best with what he knew.
Subsequent to his Hollywood years, his main compositional effort was a collaboration with the playwright Tom Stoppard, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), which has enjoyed a steady stream of semi-staged concert performances with symphony orchestra since its premiere, including a 2009 National Theatre revival.
For years, Previn was known only as a conductor, his London Symphony Orchestra tenure setting the tone for his international reputation in later decades as “a first-rate conductor of second-rate music” (according to the critic Martin Bernheimer). His strongly score-based interpretive stance stemmed from a seminal moment he had early on: he received bad news just before going onstage and poured his sorrow into the symphony at hand, only to be told afterwards that the performance was interpretively incoherent. Thus, his music making had emotional dignity in his earlier years, but often a less satisfying sobriety in later ones.
His London Symphony recordings are often his best, and they are numerous, thanks to such a congenial relationship with EMI that he could phone the company to say that a certain concert was shaping up unusually well, and have a recording team on hand by the end of the week. He championed composers that non-British conductors would not touch at that time, such as Vaughan Williams and William Walton. His hallmark was Russian repertoire: Previn’s discography had more than 250 discs of Prokofiev, and more than 100 each by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. Most important was the first recording of the uncut version of the Rachmaninov Symphony No 2 in the early 1970s: it brought new respect for the symphony, prompting a positive re-evaluation of the composer’s music at large over the following decades.
Previn’s Pittsburgh tenure established further credentials in the French repertoire, and not just Debussy and Ravel. He went through an intensive period conducting Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie in the late 1970s, and is considered to have greatly aided its dissemination, even though the then radical piece was booed in Pittsburgh.
As time went on with the Royal Philharmonic (where he was principal conductor and chief conductor, 1985-92) critics began noticing a lack of fire in both performances and recordings. Previn’s subsequent return to the US west coast to lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic, starting in 1985 – which might have been the summit of his conducting career – ended in his stormy resignation in 1989. The orchestra’s general manager, Ernest Fleischmann, who was used to operating independently, offered a Japanese tour to the then little-known Esa-Pekka Salonen without consulting Previn – one of several slights that left the conductor categorically refusing to return to the orchestra, even with different management, as a guest.
Though he had short-term relationships as a guest conductor, Previn’s frequent visits to the Vienna Philharmonic were more artistically important, establishing him as a Mozart/Strauss specialist, doubling as soloist and conductor in a Mozart piano concerto followed by a Strauss tone poem. Even later, he became a Bruckner specialist. One of his best, and most overlooked, recording projects was a vigorous, insightful complete Beethoven symphony cycle with the Royal Philharmonic from the early 1990s.
Previn often took his pianistic abilities for granted, but they were prized in many circles, not so much for technical prowess as for the way his fingers revealed interpretive insights with great precision and specificity. His earlier recordings were included in the famous Philips-label Great Pianists of the 20th Century series. Some of his best later-in-life performances were in a piano trio he formed with the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter (his fifth wife) and the cellist Daniel Müller-Schott. Among his most irreverent anecdotes – there were many – was one about a performance of the Beethoven Triple Concerto in which he was the classical-minded piano soloist, Mstislav Rostropovich was the arch-romantic cellist and Yehudi Menuhin was the technically distressed violinist. As Previn recounted to BBC Music Magazine, the conductor, Leonard Bernstein, was appalled at how badly it all came out, while Menuhin claimed to have experienced something sublime.
As a composer, he broke his silence in 1985 with a piano concerto written for Vladimir Ashkenazy, followed by a series of song cycles, including a collaboration with Toni Morrison, Honey and Rue, for Kathleen Battle in 1992. Soon, he was prolific, writing songs, chamber music and all manner of orchestral works. But despite notable success as a composer for opera with A Streetcar Named Desire and Brief Encounter, he also suffered setbacks: he lost battles for the rights to the Alessandro Baricco novel Silk and the play A Man for All Seasons. Among his orchestral works, his Violin Concerto “Anne-Sophie” is among his most successful, the recording of which won a Grammy award in 2004, one of a total of 10; in 2010 he received a lifetime achievement award.
Previn appeared to regard his composing life casually. “There’s a certain amount of self-protection in that,” he once explained. “I have a lot of commissions and it surprises me a great deal. I very often do not like what I write. People like to play it, but the critics say, ‘What a load of crap!’ It’s difficult for me to cope with.”
Yet composing was his great joy near the end – something that he could do without any buffer zone from his guest conducting, and while waiting for a flight in airports, which he often joked was the most frequent home for this man without a country. His works had deceptive sophistication. Though they were mostly agreeable in a post-Strauss, neo-Korngold fashion, works such as his Harp Concerto are strangely enigmatic in their collage of contrasting musical events, implying a deep meaning for him.
Quite remarkable was his 80th year: though he was so infirm that he had great difficulty walking on and off stage to take a bow, he finished a Concerto for Violin, Viola and Orchestra for Mutter and Yuri Bashmet, and unveiled two exceptional concert works written the previous year – the Harp Concerto for Xavier de Maistre and an orchestral work entitled Owls, for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He also revised sections of his Brief Encounter opera between guest conducting engagements in Philadelphia and Boston.
Previn composed prolifically until the end of his life, including a yet to be performed Concerto for Orchestra for the Dresden Staatskapelle and a monodrama with a Stoppard libretto for Renée Fleming on the subject of Penelope (Ulysses’ wife) that is due to be premiered this summer at Tanglewood. “A day without music is a day wasted,” he said in 2017.
Previn was married and divorced five times. With his first wife, Betty Bennett, a singer, he had two daughters, Claudia and Alicia (also known as Lovely). He and Dory separated after his affair with the actor Mia Farrow, whom he married in 1970. Together they had six children, Matthew, Sascha, Fletcher, Summer (also known as Daisy), Lark and Soon-Yi. In 1982 he married Heather Sneddon, and they had a son, Lukas, and a daughter, Li-An. Though the stated reasons for his 2006 divorce from Mutter, whom he married in 2002, were vague, it is clear that Previn suffered considerable grief at the end of the union. He referred to Mutter as “my very best friend” and said that they spoke every day on the phone. Previn described their relationship as “the divorce that didn’t work”.
Previn is survived by nine of his children. His daughter Lark died in 2008.
• André George Previn (Andreas Ludwig Priwin), pianist, conductor and composer, born 6 April 1929; died 28 February 2019
An exercise in intelligence:
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Friday, 1 March 2019
Wednesday night's set lists at The Habit, York
Ron Elderly (1): -
One More Cup Of Coffee
House Of The Rising Sun
Da Elderly (1): -
Till There Was You
Old Man
The Elderly Brothers: -
All I Have To Do Is Dream
You Really Got A Hold On Me
Medley: Sweet Caroline/Hi Ho Silver Lining
When Will I Be Loved
Let It Be Me
I Saw Her Standing There
Ron Elderly (2): -
Cry For Me
Suspicious Minds
Da Elderly (2): -
She's The One
Here Comes The Sun
On an unseasonably warm night, The Habit was strangely empty most of the time and then full from around 11:15 - you never know what to expect. Our usual host Simon was ill, so his place was taken by previous host Dave, who managed to keep things going despite a disappointing turnout and a dearth of players. Everyone who wanted to play got a run at the mic and then we went around again, with The Elderly Brothers getting a good turn mid-evening of about 20 minutes. Taxi driver Chris turned up late-ish on and I accompanied him on Bring It On Home To Me, Birds and Only Love Can Break Your Heart. Ron accompanied an member of the audience who plucked up courage to sing at the mic, choosing Can't Help Falling In Love. The house music was turned on after midnight, so there was no unplugged session either, but we managed to keep yapping for an hour or so anyway! See you next week.
One More Cup Of Coffee
House Of The Rising Sun
Da Elderly (1): -
Till There Was You
Old Man
The Elderly Brothers: -
All I Have To Do Is Dream
You Really Got A Hold On Me
Medley: Sweet Caroline/Hi Ho Silver Lining
When Will I Be Loved
Let It Be Me
I Saw Her Standing There
Ron Elderly (2): -
Cry For Me
Suspicious Minds
Da Elderly (2): -
She's The One
Here Comes The Sun
On an unseasonably warm night, The Habit was strangely empty most of the time and then full from around 11:15 - you never know what to expect. Our usual host Simon was ill, so his place was taken by previous host Dave, who managed to keep things going despite a disappointing turnout and a dearth of players. Everyone who wanted to play got a run at the mic and then we went around again, with The Elderly Brothers getting a good turn mid-evening of about 20 minutes. Taxi driver Chris turned up late-ish on and I accompanied him on Bring It On Home To Me, Birds and Only Love Can Break Your Heart. Ron accompanied an member of the audience who plucked up courage to sing at the mic, choosing Can't Help Falling In Love. The house music was turned on after midnight, so there was no unplugged session either, but we managed to keep yapping for an hour or so anyway! See you next week.
Thursday, 28 February 2019
Tuesday, 26 February 2019
Elizabethan Miniatures at The National Portrait Gallery - review
National Portrait Gallery, London
Sharp sight, close scrutiny and an unbelievably steady hand unite in these exquisite Elizabethan miniatures – among the greatest works in European art
Laura Cumming
The Observer
Sun 24 Feb 2019
The man in the picture is on fire with love. Flames surge and ripple around him. Dressed in nothing but a fine lawn undershirt, open almost to the waist, hair slicked back from his beautiful face in the heat, he is all ready for the beloved. A woman whose identity is revealed – if only we could make it out – in the miniature dangling from a chain round his neck, a portrait even smaller than this one. She gave herself to him, in private, and now he offers himself in return: a lover burning with passion.
Nicholas Hilliard’s Unknown Young Man Against a Background of Flames is a stupendous painting – overwhelmingly potent and erotic. Yet it is not quite three inches tall. An object made to be held in the hand, to be touched, examined, even kissed, it nonetheless has the full force of a life-size portrait, the lover so fully present as to appear immediately recognisable (a young Ciarán Hinds), his message conveyed with dramatic urgency. And Hilliard goes further, exploiting the diminutive scale as no conventional portraitist could. The flames are scattered with powdered gold so that when the picture is turned this way and that, the fire of love leaps into life.
Sun 24 Feb 2019
The man in the picture is on fire with love. Flames surge and ripple around him. Dressed in nothing but a fine lawn undershirt, open almost to the waist, hair slicked back from his beautiful face in the heat, he is all ready for the beloved. A woman whose identity is revealed – if only we could make it out – in the miniature dangling from a chain round his neck, a portrait even smaller than this one. She gave herself to him, in private, and now he offers himself in return: a lover burning with passion.
Nicholas Hilliard’s Unknown Young Man Against a Background of Flames is a stupendous painting – overwhelmingly potent and erotic. Yet it is not quite three inches tall. An object made to be held in the hand, to be touched, examined, even kissed, it nonetheless has the full force of a life-size portrait, the lover so fully present as to appear immediately recognisable (a young Ciarán Hinds), his message conveyed with dramatic urgency. And Hilliard goes further, exploiting the diminutive scale as no conventional portraitist could. The flames are scattered with powdered gold so that when the picture is turned this way and that, the fire of love leaps into life.
Unknown Man Against a Background of Flames, by Nicholas Hilliard, c1600. Photograph: Clare Johnson/Victoria and Albert Museum
Described by him as “a thing apart from all other painting or drawing”, the portrait miniatures of Hilliard (1547-1619) and his sometime pupil Isaac Oliver (1565-1617) are not just a unique contribution to the evolution of British painting, but among the great works of European art. Hilliard was the first English artist to be “much admired”, a contemporary wrote, “amongst strangers”. Prized by Medicis, Hapsburgs and Bourbons, he was compared to Raphael. John Donne, homing in on the genius of his miniatures in comparison to enormous history paintings, wrote that “a hand, or eye/ By Hilliard drawn, is worth an history,/ By a worse painter made”.
The hand in a Hilliard is fractional, the eye practically subatomic. Naturally, this is what strikes first in this magnificent show, as you struggle to see how the miracle is achieved through the magnifying glass conveniently supplied. But enlargement turns out to explain nothing of the magic: the air of wayward distractedness in Sir Walter Raleigh’s brilliant blue eyes; the hopeful optimism in the teenage face of Henry, Prince of Wales, with his incipient moustache; the alarming steeliness of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, favourite of Elizabeth I.
Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester by Hilliard
The queen’s appearance itself, so often painted as little more than a jewelled diagram, bodies forth with far greater plausibility in these miniatures. Hilliard, 30 years a court painter, particularly captures the curious contours of her egg-shaped head, the cavernous eye sockets and protuberant lower lip. Isaac Oliver went further, showing a deep crease in the forehead, thinning hair and a greater protuberance as Gloriana lost her teeth.
Francis Bacon later Baron Verulam and Viscount St Alban by Hilliard
Sharp sight, close scrutiny; there is some irreducible connection between scale and observation in this art. Hilliard and Oliver are so much more acute than their contemporaries. It is not just that their portraits haven’t the usual stiffness of Elizabethan art, nor its superficial concern with power, but that they seem so probing in their contemplation.
Sir Francis Drake, veteran explorer, has weather-reddened cheeks and undeceived eyes. Francis Bacon, future philosopher and statesman, is already exhausted by his own midnight-oil precocity as a shrewd 17-year-old thinker. And if you did not know that Sir Philip Sidney’s sister Mary was herself a considerable writer, you might deduce it from her half-smiling face, quick with intelligent curiosity.
Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, by Isaac Oliver, c. 1596. Photograph: Private Collection/ © Christie's, 2011.
The Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron and (some say) lover, appears in a staggering image by Isaac Oliver, far more revealing than any of the many other likenesses painted during his lifetime. The notorious love lock descends almost to his navel, the high quiff appears to be held aloft with something like sugared water, and his amused round eyes catch yours with an expression of almost unnerving confidence.
Ludovick Stuart, 2nd Duke of Lennox and Duke of Richmond 1574-1624, The Fitzwilliam Museum
How these miniatures are made is the subject of a short film and an excellent display at the National Portrait Gallery. Bright as enamel, they are, in fact, painted with something like modern watercolour – crushed pigment bound with gum – using humble squirrel-hair brushes. Colossal photographic magnifications show almost imperceptible stipplings and shadings: the single suave line by which Hilliard dashes off an eyelid; Oliver’s gift for a graduated blush.
Anne of Denmark, National Portrait Gallery
A steady hand was the merest requirement. These artists had to get a likeness down in two or three sittings lasting not much more than an hour – like Holbein or Van Dyck – but on a piece of vellum no bigger than a playing card. And cards were the commonest form of support; a portrait of Elizabeth I, in this show, has the Queen of Hearts glued to the back. There is wit in the miniaturist’s art.
And it is evident in the face of Hilliard himself, with all his questioning vitality. Sixteenth-century self-portraits are so rare in England that perhaps only three are known: two in oils and this far greater miniature, in which the young painter announces himself as an aristocrat. Exeter-born, London-trained as a jeweller, Hilliard saw the works of Holbein in England and Clouet in France (Elizabeth had trouble getting him home), and still he seems to have sprung fully formed from nowhere.
Self-portrait aged 30, by Nicholas Hilliard. Photograph: Victoria & Albert Museum
Oliver has speed, humour, open affection. His terrific portrait of the Browne brothers shows a trio of likely lads entwined like The Three Graces for a lark. His new young wife looks back at the painter with an equal degree of warmth. He appears more modern, continental, broader of stroke, better at perspective. Hilliard is more austere, yet also profound.
Unknown Lady by Hilliard, The Fitzwilliam Museum
Hilliard wrote a treatise full of advice for fellow miniaturists. “Let your apparel be silk, such as sheddeth least dust or hairs.” Talk gently to keep your fidgety sitters (notably James I) from moving. Aim for the immediacy of a private encounter, and all “those lovely graces, witty smilings, and those stolen glances which suddenly like lightning pass”. For these images are unlike any other: intimate objects that may be kept in secret boxes or worn in lockets about the body, brought out for a moment and then hidden away; messages of love, to be passed from hand to hand.
Self-portrait by Isaac Oliver, National Portrait Gallery
And this is nowhere more explicit than in Hilliard’s famously mysterious portrait of 1588, known as Man Clasping a Hand from a Cloud. The identity of the eponymous gentleman, with his pale eyes and fine golden tendrils, has never been established. Perhaps something in his black satin doublet and elaborate hat, trimmed with intricate silver lace, might have given a clue in his day. But descending from the transparent circles of cloud above is another hand cuffed with equally complicated lace. It might be male or female; certainly it is as slim and graceful as his own.
Man Clasping Hand from a Cloud by Hilliard, 1588
If Hilliard’s art draws you straight into the private lives of Elizabethans, this painting goes closer still to the sitter’s heart (quite literally, if it was meant to hang there). The gentleman clasps the hand of his beloved, who is perhaps dead and gone, but still looking down upon him from the afterlife, protecting him, accompanying him wherever he goes – like the miniature itself, a masterpiece as condensed as a sonnet.
● Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures By Hilliard and Oliver is at National Portrait Gallery, London, until 19 May
If Hilliard’s art draws you straight into the private lives of Elizabethans, this painting goes closer still to the sitter’s heart (quite literally, if it was meant to hang there). The gentleman clasps the hand of his beloved, who is perhaps dead and gone, but still looking down upon him from the afterlife, protecting him, accompanying him wherever he goes – like the miniature itself, a masterpiece as condensed as a sonnet.
● Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures By Hilliard and Oliver is at National Portrait Gallery, London, until 19 May
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