{"id":150,"date":"2021-03-30T15:50:31","date_gmt":"2021-03-30T15:50:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sohothedog.com\/previnjazz\/?page_id=150"},"modified":"2021-04-12T20:52:41","modified_gmt":"2021-04-12T20:52:41","slug":"interlude-on-classical-music","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.sohothedog.com\/previnjazz\/interlude-on-classical-music\/","title":{"rendered":"INTERLUDE: On Classical Music"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In August of 1955, the Hollywood Bowl presented an ambitious and wide-ranging \u201cFestival of the Americas,\u201d directed by Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in works by himself, William Schuman, Lukas Foss, and Aaron Copland (the\u00a0Lincoln Portrait<\/em>, narrated by Gregory Peck). Martha Graham and her company danced three modern American ballets. Carlos Chavez guest-conducted a program of works by Latin American composers. The fourth concert was jazz: the likes of Dave Brubeck and Shorty Rogers shared the bill with Lee Konitz and Billie Holiday. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Though he wasn\u2019t listed as such in the program, Previn apparently was a main organizer of the concert. (At least one source<\/a> listed him as the concert\u2019s music director.) That would explain Previn\u2019s presence on a panel alongside Leonard Feather and Feather\u2019s fellow critic Ralph Gleason, with Bernstein moderating the discussion. It would also explain why the players on the program skewed so strongly toward the West Coast studio community that Previn knew best. (It might also explain why Previn himself had space on the concert for three solo numbers.) But it\u2019s still notable that Previn would be both the quasi-impresario and players\u2019 spokesperson, as it were, for this incursion of jazz into a festival of predominantly high-minded modern classical repertoire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though his recorded catalog on the 1940s and 1950s doesn\u2019t much show it, Previn had always kept a hand in classical music. He had played at the Hollywood Bowl as early as 1946, when he was a contestant in the KFI-Hollywood Bowl young performers competition. (He placed third, winning a $100 scholarship.) He returned several times over the next few years, both as a conductor and a soloist. In 1949, he made his first appearance at Evenings on the Roof, the new-music-heavy chamber series that eventually evolved into the Monday Evening Concerts; Previn would return to the series many times, in music from Beethoven to Hindemith. He played twelve-tone music by Rolf Liebermann; he played Stravinsky\u2019s\u00a0Serenade in A<\/em>\u00a0with the composer looming in the front row. (\u201cYou have wonderful fingers,\u201d Stravinsky told Previn, Delphically.) One program opened with Previn and Lukas Foss in a Mozart four-hand sonata, a performance, Previn remembered, prepared on two days\u2019 notice after series director Lawrence Morton told each player, neither of whom were familiar with the score, that the other had played it many times. (Both Tynan\u2019s 1957 profile of Previn in Downbeat <\/em>and a 1959 profile in Time <\/em>say that Foss and Previn recorded a four-hand Mozart album for Decca, but, despite the apparent existence of liner notes<\/a> by Morton, as well as a discography entry<\/a> by Michael Gray, I cannot find any hint that such a recording was ever released. Foss did record some Mozart duets with Walter Hendl.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before he went into the army, Previn recorded The Story of a Piano<\/strong><\/em> (RCA Victor, 1952), a children\u2019s album with narrator Hans Conried telling the tale of a piano who makes its way from the factory to a music school to a nightclub and beyond, always dreaming of its Carnegie Hall debut; the handful of chestnuts sprinkled in along the way\u2014Schumann\u2019s \u201cTra\u00fcmerei,\u201d Chopin\u2019s A-minor Valse\u2014represent his classical recording debut. More serious was a 1958 recording of Ernest Chausson\u2019s op. 30 Piano Quartet produced by Contemporary\u2019s Lester Koenig for his brief-lived Society for Forgotten Music imprint. And, for Contemporary, Previn teamed up with violinist Nathan Rubin for a recording of the \u201cCapriccio\u201d by jazz clarinetist\/avant-garde composer William O. Smith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Previn\u2019s real arrival as a classical artist on record came in 1959. And, tellingly, it was not in European or avant-garde repertoire but, rather, in music of the original jazz-to-classical crossover artist: George Gershwin. Previn\u2019s recording of the Rhapsody in Blue<\/em> and the Concerto in F<\/em>, with conductor Andre Kostelanetz and his orchestra, was also his debut on the Columbia label. Previn\u2019s rendition is very much that of a jazz player. Earl Wild or Jes\u00fas Maria Sanroma, say, had treated Gershwin\u2019s scores\u2014brilliantly\u2014as a kind of jazz-tinged Rachmaninoff, but Previn\u2019s rendition is more brittle and brash. (Over the years, the pendulum of Gershwin interpretation would eventually swing back toward Previn\u2019s approach.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After 1960, Previn would, for a few years, move virtually all of his recording activity to Columbia and, later, RCA Victor as well. The change was in keeping with both his classical and jazz ambitions\u2014Columbia\u2019s CBS Masterworks and RCA were the leading American classical labels, but Columbia also boasted an enviable jazz roster: Brubeck, Ellington, Miles. Both labels were also much larger concerns than Contemporary, with production and marketing capacity across all genres that Contemporary could never match. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which brings us to Previn\u2019s shift into what would later be characterized as easy-listening. To be sure, Previn\u2019s orchestral-pop and\/or piano-with-strings records would always be more jazz-inflected than many others on the racks, but it\u2019s the sort of music that a label like Contemporary would largely eschew. Columbia and RCA Victor were well set-up to fund, promote, and sell easy-listening albums; Previn was well-trained to record and conduct them. A sympathetic critic could characterize\u00a0Secret Songs for Young Lovers<\/em>\u00a0and its successors as descendants of, say,\u00a0Charlie Parker with Strings<\/em>\u00a0and the like, but none of the critics were that sympathetic; by the time Previn\u2019s efforts, even the most overtly jazzy, hit the market, they would be filed with Jackie Gleason\u2019s mood-music records, or Percy Faith, or Kostelanetz\u2019s more syrupy releases, and so on. Previn, as far as I can tell, considered it a job, one he could do easily, one he could do well, one that could make him and his label money, giving him the wherewithal to pursue his classical ambitions.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jazz, too, became a kind of leverage, especially once Previn added classical conducting to his portfolio. Red Mitchell recalled barnstorming tours in which the Previn-Mitchell-Capp trio would perform half a concert, after which Previn would conduct the local orchestra, building up his status and experience as a guest conductor. (Previn\u2019s initial forays as a classical conductor were an odd combination of exceptional privilege\u2014Ronald Wilford of Columbia Artists Management took him on as a client immediately\u2014and several years of on-the-road dues-paying.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout the 1960s, one feels Previn\u2019s jazz and jazz-adjacent work and his classical work slowly change places, the moonlighting becoming the day job and vice versa. How much of Previn\u2019s trajectory was calculated and how much of it was improvised is an open question. But, if Previn\u2019s easy-listening albums were part of a career bargain, one could say that Previn got the better end of the deal: within a decade of his Gershwin album with Kostelanetz, Previn was (temporarily) done with jazz and (permanently) done with mood music, free to pursue his calling as a conductor. All it cost him was his reputation among the jazz cognoscenti.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2190 Previous: 195<\/em>8<\/a> | Next: 1959<\/em> \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In August of 1955, the Hollywood Bowl presented an ambitious and wide-ranging \u201cFestival of the Americas,\u201d directed by Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in works by himself, William Schuman, Lukas Foss, and Aaron Copland (the\u00a0Lincoln Portrait, narrated by Gregory Peck). Martha Graham and her company danced three modern American ballets. Carlos Chavez … Continue reading “INTERLUDE: On Classical Music”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-150","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sohothedog.com\/previnjazz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sohothedog.com\/previnjazz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sohothedog.com\/previnjazz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sohothedog.com\/previnjazz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sohothedog.com\/previnjazz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.sohothedog.com\/previnjazz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":460,"href":"https:\/\/www.sohothedog.com\/previnjazz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/150\/revisions\/460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sohothedog.com\/previnjazz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}