Andre Previn, pianist, composer and conductor, dies at 89

André Previn, 89, who blurred the boundaries between jazz, pop and classical music — and between composing, conducting and performing — in an extraordinarily eclectic, award-filled career, died Thursday at his Manhattan home. He was 89.

Previn wrote or arranged the music for dozens of movies and received four Academy Awards, and was nominated for three Oscars in one year alone — 1961, 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 and as a composer who turned out musicals, orchestral works, chamber music, operas and concertos. He was also the music director or principal conductor of a half-dozen orchestras.

Critics described Previn as a "wunderkind in a turtleneck" 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 Previn became the principal conductor of the London Symphony in 1968 was "Almost Like Bernstein."

And like Bernstein, Previn was no stranger to a life of glamour and media attention, particularly when Mia Farrow left her husband, Frank Sinatra, and married Previn after an affair that filled the gossip columns.

"See you in the Morning beloved Friend," tweeted Farrow, who was divorced from Previn in 1979. "May you rest in glorious symphonies."

Bernstein was Previn's 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."

Previn made recordings with Benny Carter and Mahalia Jackson and an album of jazz arrangements of songs from "My Fair Lady. (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 jazz historian Ted Gioia said Previn had been "something of a popularizer of jazz rather than a serious practitioner."

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 Priwin on April 6, 1929, in Berlin. After his parents realized he had perfect pitch, 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 composer and conductor Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, violinist and composer Joseph Achron and composer Ernst Toch. He soon recorded all the four-handed piano music of Mozart with composer Lukas Foss.

Edward Nixon, 88, the youngest and last surviving of the three brothers of former President Richard Nixon, died ­Wednesday.

Edward Nixon, a Seattle geologist and U.S. Navy veteran, died at a nursing facility in Bothell, Wash.

The former president's daughters, Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, remembered their uncle as "our family's rock."

"He was a source of guidance to our father, whose favorite little Eddie grew up into a renowned geologist with an infectious curiosity," the daughters said in a statement. "He was always thinking, always working — never for his own benefit, but to uncover the answers to questions that science poses in our world."

Edward Nixon worked on his brother's presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972, when he was co-chairman of the Nixon re-election committee, and remained his ardent defender even after the former president's resignation during the Watergate scandal.

An original member of the board of directors of the Nixon Foundation, Edward Nixon was among those who felt the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum's efforts to be more critical and truthful about his brother's role in the Watergate episode tarnished his legacy.

The foundation temporarily suspended funding for programs at the Nixon library when the library invited former White House counsel John Dean — who revealed Nixon's involvement in the Watergate coverup — to speak in 2009.

Born in Whittier, Calif., Edward Nixon served as a naval aviator and helicopter flight instructor in the Navy. In 2009, he co-authored a book with Karen L. Olson about his brother and his life called "The Nixons: A Family Portrait."

Edward Nixon is survived by two daughters.

New York Times