ANDRÉ PREVIN (1929–2019)Five Songs (1978)

This chapter discusses a set of fluent, pleasing songs by the internationally-celebrated conductor and composer, André Previn, in which he demonstrates his innate flair and natural feeling for vocal timbre. Like other American composers, he possesses the knack of setting English texts in a smooth, unforced way; phrases follow the natural contours of the texts and are largely undemanding. The songs are therefore suitable for a comparative novice. Accompaniments, too, are sensitive and well judged. The musical idiom is appealingly straightforward, with a gently shifting tonality. In these songs, Previn has successfully applied his distinctive gifts to the traditional ‘art-song’ repertoire, investing it with his highly individual musical sensibility and panache.

Orchestral Theatre and the Concert as a Performance Laboratory

In the past decade the National Theatre has presented two restagings of earlier productions, now featuring an onstage orchestra (the Southbank Sinfonia) that has been choreographed and made a key part of the spectacle: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, by Tom Stoppard, with a musical score by André Previn, performed in 2009 and 2010, and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, performed in 2016 and 2018. Contemporaneously, a vanguard of British orchestras has begun to explore how concerts can be presented in ways that are more theatrically sophisticated than the standard concert format. Here Adrian Curtin investigates ‘orchestral theatre’ as an aesthetic proposition by examining the collaborations between the Southbank Sinfonia and the National Theatre, and their legacy in a series of experimental concerts staged by the Southbank Sinfonia entitled #ConcertLab. He aims to identify the artistic and cultural significance of these collaborations and #ConcertLab so as to better understand contemporary efforts to present orchestras (and, more broadly, classical music) in a theatrically innovative manner. Adrian Curtin is a senior lecturer in the Drama Department at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave, 2014) and Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality (Manchester University Press, 2019), and principal investigator of the AHRC research network ‘Representing “Classical Music” in the Twenty-First Century’.

Serious Screen Fare, but Flying High on Stage

After a false start on one project for MGM (which did ultimately resurface for them a few years later), Comden and Green discovered that Gene Kelly loved an idea they had had for a follow-up to the stage musical On the Town, and that scenario (about three guys reuniting ten years after their service together in World War II) became the basis for their newest film. With music by André Previn, the movie, It’s Always Fair Weather, starred Kelly, along with Dan Dailey and Michael Kidd. Before they completed work on the screenplay a call from Jerome Robbins had them at work on their next stage project; they contributed additional songs to the new version of Peter Pan he was staging. It was the classic that starred Mary Martin.

Making Rollerball

This chapter examines the making of Rollerball (1975). It starts with an overview of the cast and crew and the filming locations, principally Munich, West Germany, where Norman Jewison shot the film's game sequences and also utilised other aspects of the city's modernist architecture. For the making of Rollerball, Jewison brought together three of the leading lights of British post-war cinema — production designer John Box, Douglas Slocombe as director of photography, and Julie Harris as costume designer. Acclaimed European conductor André Previn scored the soundtrack, largely comprised of classical music. The chapter then presents a detailed scene-by-scene breakdown of the film, considering the interplay of their various contributions to Rollerball and how this influenced the final look and feel of the film, including how it blended the film's signature violent action with an examination of more sophisticated dystopian social themes.

Dark Mirrors and Dead Ringers: Music for Suspense Films about Twins

This paper compares the modernist musical-narrative separations of The Dark Mirror (Robert Siodmak, 1946), Dead Ringer (Paul Henreid, 1964), and Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973) with the postmodernist musical-narrative fusions of the Canadian film Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988). The two earlier films (starring Olivia de Havilland and Bette Davis, respectively) mainly conform to the aesthetic of film noir or "suspense-thriller," whereas the two later films (starring Margot Kidder and Jeremy Irons, respectively) also contain substantial elements of "horror." The musical scores of these four films (by Dimitri Tiomkin, André Previn, Bernard Herrmann, and Howard Shore) feature, in varying degrees, the meaningful placement and development of leitmotifs and titles music, changes in meaning by altering instrumentation and/or mode, gender representations, and issues of cultural hierarchy and class distinctions.