A composer, conductor and pianist, he made a career of crossing from classical music to pop, from movie scores to jazz, winning Oscars and Grammys.
André Previn, who blurred the boundaries between jazz, pop and classical music — and between composing, conducting and performing — in an extraordinarily eclectic, award-filled career, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by his manager, Linda Petrikova.
Mr. Previn wrote or arranged the music for several dozen movies and was the only person in the history of the Academy Awards to receive three nominations in one year — 1961, for the scores for “Elmer Gantry” and “Bells Are Ringing” and the song “Faraway Part of Town” from the comedy “Pepe.”
Audiences also knew him as a jazz pianist who appeared with Ella Fitzgerald, among others, and as a composer who turned out musicals, orchestral works, chamber music, operas and concertos for his fifth wife, the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter .
Mr. Previn was also the music director or principal conductor of a half-dozen orchestras.
Critics described him as a “wunderkind in a turtleneck” and the “Mickey Mouse maestro” when he was in his 20s and 30s. He was often compared to Leonard Bernstein, a similarly versatile conductor, composer and pianist. Time magazine’s headline when Mr. Previn became the principal conductor of the London Symphony in 1968 was “Almost Like Bernstein.” Newsweek summarized Mr. Previn’s appointment as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1985 as “Bernstein West.”
Mr. Previn himself considered Bernstein an idol. “Bernstein has made it possible not to specialize in one area of music,” he said. “You no longer have to do just Broadway shows, or movies, or conduct — you can do any or all of them.”
And Mr. Previn did. In the 1960s, he appeared in sold-out classical and jazz concerts. Sometimes he combined genres, playing a concerto before intermission and jazz with a trio after. Dizzy Gillespie marveled at his performances. “He has the flow, you know, which a lot of guys don’t have and won’t ever get,” he said.
Mr. Previn made recordings with Benny Carter and Mahalia Jackson and an album of jazz arrangements of songs from “My Fair Lady” with the drummer Shelly Manne and the bass player Leroy Vinnegar. (Mr. Previn was later the conductor and music supervisor for the film version of “My Fair Lady.”) He also made two albums with Dinah Shore and recorded a collection of Christmas carols with Julie Andrews and George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with Andre Kostelanetz.
But the classical world was never comfortable with his work in jazz, and the jazz historian Ted Gioia said Mr. Previn had become “something of a popularizer of jazz rather than a serious practitioner” as he grew older.
Mr. Previn disdained all the labels. “I never considered myself a jazz musician,” he said in 1986, “but a musician who occasionally played jazz.”
He was born Andreas Ludwig Prewin on April 6,1929, in Berlin. After his parents realized he had perfect pitch — his father had been an amateur pianist in Berlin — André entered the Berlin Conservatory when he was 6. His father, Jacob, a Polish-born lawyer who was Jewish, moved the family to Paris in 1938 to escape the Nazis.
André studied with Marcel Dupré at the Paris Conservatory for about a year before the family left for Los Angeles. There, he studied with the composer and conductor Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, the violinist and composer Joseph Achron and the composer Ernst Toch. He soon recorded all the four-hand piano music of Mozart with the composer Lukas Foss, who was not quite seven years older than Mr. Previn.
Mr. Previn became an American citizen in 1943, and in 1950 he was drafted into the Army and served with the Sixth Army Band. He also studied conducting in San Francisco with Pierre Monteux, whom he later followed at the London Symphony.
