33 Quotes by Andre Previn

A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.

I've had the healthy and sobering experience of constantly working with music that is invariably better than any performance of it can be.

I'm on very good terms with all my former wives.

I don't write things that are wildly abstractly atonal.

If you’re going to do good work, the work has to scare you.

The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance – whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.

The extraordinary mystique of hers made you think she lived on rose petals and listened to nothing but Mozart, but it wasn’t true. She was quite funny and ribald. She could tell a dirty joke. She played charades with a great sense of fun and vulgarity, and she could be quite bitchy.

I remain extraordinarily proud of the Vaughan Williams symphonies I recorded with the LSO, and in the 1980s and '90s, I made an almost complete cycle of orchestral works by Richard Strauss with the Vienna Philharmonic.

There's a small group of music critics in the States who will forgive you anything - jazz, a long prison term, or what have you - anything but scoring a Hollywood musical.