Previn

André Previn turned seventy in 1999. From Berlin refugee to multi-Oscar-winning film score composer, from great jazz pianist to chief conductor of both the London Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestras, through four marriages including Mia Farrow and present wife Heather, with an honorary knighthood for his services to British music, his story is extraordinary. Previn's remarkable career reached a climax in September 1998 with the premier of his first opera, A Streetcar Named Desire. He also conducted the production at the San Francisco Opera, with Renée Fleming as Blanche.

This was André Previn's second album after his long, symphonically enforced absence from jazz, and it sounds noticeably more fluid and relaxed than his first. No longer apprehensive about dusting off his old skills, Previn is delightfully confident and breezy (dig his sly turns on "Come Rain or Come Shine" and "C Jam Blues"), taking some chances as he re-phrases and paraphrases a collection of revivified standards, mostly Harold Arlen and assorted Duke Ellington. Even if Previn, that noted wit, sometimes sounds as if he is kidding the pants off these old tunes, it's great to hear him having such a good time playing jazz again. Mundell Lowe is Previn's new guitar partner, and Ray Brown returns on bass; both are right at home in this refined brand of chamber jazz grooving.

Here is an example of crossover marketing '90s style - a classical conductor/jazz pianist signed to the classical Deutsche Grammophon label, whose previous jazz album issued on DG got lost in the shops and whose next disc was prudently shifted over to PolyGram's jazz line, Verve. The occasion was a rare jazz concert in Vienna's legendary, acoustically marvelous symphony hall, the Musikvereinsaal, where Previn - who normally leads the Vienna Philharmonic there - enraptured the Viennese with his piano/guitar/bass trio. According to Previn, one member of the Philharmonic was astonished to learn that the music was made on the wing ("You improvised in public?!," he exclaimed). Well, it wasn't that big a deal for Previn and his usual cohorts Mundell Lowe (guitar) and Ray Brown (bass), who turn in an amiable collection of mostly vintage standards that they probably know in their sleep…

From the start of his intermittent side career as a jazz pianist, esteemed conductor and composer Andre Previn has shown more feeling for the form than most classical artists who cross over. Going beyond a recreational involvement in improvised music, he has deepened his playing since skimming stylistic surfaces on his bestselling My Fair Lady album of nearly 50 years ago. Now 78, he gives us what may be his most satisfying jazz recording in Alone: Ballads for Solo Piano. The solo format allows him to reflect his debt to piano masters including Art Tatum, Erroll Garner, and Bud Powell in ways his work with trios and combos hasn't, while showing off his super-refined lyrical touch with its sophisticated sense of color.

This, one of Tippett's earliest acknowledged works, is one of his most popular. The music relates the true story of a young German Jew who, terrified and enraged at the treatment of his mother, kills a Nazi officer and touches off a violent pogrom. Tippett adopts the structure of Bach's Passions, in which arias alternate with choruses and Lutheran hymns (chorales), although in place of the chorales Tippett substitutes magnificently moving Negro spirituals. "A Child of our Time" offers music of rage, poignancy, and deep compassion. As the title itself implies, it is both specific to a certain time and place, and universal as well. No lover of classical music can afford to ignore it.

This solo piano set from Andre Previn is a bit unusual for he recasts ten Harold Arlen compositions (all but "For Every Man There's a Woman" and "Cocoanut Sweet" are quite well-known) by reharmonizing the chords and modernizing the melodies…

For this slightly unusual LP Shorty Rogers and Andre Previn split the arranging chores in a somewhat competitive fashion. Rogers arranges a standard and then that is followed by a Previn original based on the same chord structure. This procedure is followed until the halfway point of the date when they reverse roles. As performed by a nonet featuring Rogers' trumpet, Previn's piano, altoist Bud Shank, Bob Cooper on tenor, baritonist Jimmy Giuffre, trombonist Milt Bernhart and a rhythm section, the result is a dead heat with some fine swinging solos on tunes (and variations) of such songs as "It's DeLovely," "You Stepped Out Of A Dream" and "You Do Something To Me."

Anne-Sophie Mutter is joined in by André Previn and cellist Daniel Müller-Schott for these performances of the finest of Mozart's Piano Trios, filmed in Mantua's magnificent 18th-century Teatro Bibiena. "The outstanding musicians making music in an affectionate and elegant way" (International Record Review). "Mutter's warm tone and her subtle gradations of vibrato are a constant pleasure" (BBC Music Magazine).

Previn's Four Songs, using poems by Toni Morrison, continues the US song tradition established by Copland. They may not be strikingly original in style (they owe a debt to 12 Poems of Emily Dickinson), but they are very attractive, idiomatically American and movingly evocative of their texts. The set was written for Sylvia McNair, with a plangent cello obbligato for Yo-Yo Ma. McNair is outstanding here, her voice radiant but warm, soaring but secure.

On this transatlantic disc, three American composers born during the first half of the last century rub shoulders with two young musicians from Eastern Europe. A member of the BBC New Generation Artists scheme, the violinist Aleksey Semenenko first met the pianist Artem Belogurov at the Stolyarsky Special Music School in Odessa at an early age. Even if their individual careers have taken to different parts of the world, the two still perform together whenever possible, and here they present three sonatas.