page_title: André Previn
section_title: In the film studios
hierarchical_section_title: André Previn / In the film studios
caption_attribution_description: English: André Previn in the In Tune studio (BBC Radio)
context_page_description: André George Previn KBE was a German-American pianist, composer, arranger, and conductor.
  His career was three-pronged. Starting by arranging and composing Hollywood film scores for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Previn was involved in the music for over 50 films over his entire career. He won four Academy Awards for his film work and ten Grammy Awards for his recordings. He was also the music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Oslo Philharmonic, as well as the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. In jazz, Previn was a pianist-interpreter and arranger of songs from the Great American Songbook, was piano-accompanist to singers of jazz standards, and was a trio pianist.
context_section_description: Previn was involved in creating the music for over 50 films and won four Academy Awards for his work.
  Previn's career began in 1946, when he was still in high school, as a composer, conductor, and arranger at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, after their music department noticed his work for a local radio program and wished to hire him. Previn recalled that MGM were "looking for somebody who was talented, fast and cheap and, because I was a kid, I was all three. So they hired me to do piecework and I evidently did it very well." His first official credit was for an entry in the Lassie series, The Sun Comes Up (1949), which much later he thought was "the most inept score you ever heard" after seeing a television rerun.
  Previn was a full-time employee at MGM. He was called for military service in 1950. While stationed with the Sixth Army Band at the Presidio of San Francisco, Previn took private conducting lessons from Pierre Monteux, then conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, which he valued highly, for two years from 1951. In 1953, Previn returned to Hollywood and focused his attention on film scores and jazz. Previn stayed at MGM for 16 years, but despite the secure job and good pay, had grown increasingly confined and desired to pursue classical music. He resigned from MGM at 32, wanting "to gamble with whatever talent I might have had."
  His break with the film world in the 1960s was not as straightforward as he claimed in later life. He won a 1964 Oscars for Best Scoring of Music – Adaptation or Treatment for My Fair Lady (film). His film work continued until Rollerball (1975). Over his entire film career, Previn was involved in the music for over 50 movies as composer, conductor or performer.
caption: Previn in 2012
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