A ‘FAVOUR’ FROM PREVIN AND STOPPARD

Composers take different physical approaches to composition. Some write at the piano, some write while standing, some at a desk, others seated in a chair.

Andre Previn wrote the score to “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,” his collaboration with playwright Tom Stoppard, subtitled “a theater piece for actors and orchestra,” flat on his back.

To receive its belated Los Angeles premiere Dec. 18 (and for three days afterward) by forces brought together by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn., “Every Good Boy” started life as a request, early in 1977, from Previn to Stoppard for, as Previn says today, “a narration around which I could build an orchestral piece.”

The playwright and the composer--at that time, Previn was already living in England and principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO)--were “very good friends,” but, as Previn remembers, “We had never collaborated.” Then the conductor/composer, who was putting together a weeklong festival in connection with the 25th jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, asked Stoppard for a text.

“I hadn’t intended to write a piece myself,” Previn recalls. “But I had already asked a number of other composers for pieces. So, I thought, I’ll write something myself, with words by England’s greatest playwright--which Tom was, and still is. A small piece, maybe 20 minutes.”

Stoppard’s first response was provocative.

“Tom announced that he would rather try a ‘piece for actors and orchestra.’ His first sketches were about a madman millionaire who owned a symphony orchestra to play at his bidding. It was a wonderfully bizarre idea and we both fooled with it intermittently.

“And then, one day, Tom phoned to tell me that his mind had raced off on another tack. . . . When he sent me the draft of what is now ‘EGBDF,’ I was totally happy with it, filled with admiration and worried about my contribution to it.”

There remained only for Previn to invent that contribution. But he didn’t. A first deadline passed. A second deadline loomed. The premiere date edged closer and closer.

Then fate stepped in.

“I slipped a disc in my lower back and was put to bed, where I was told to lie immobile for at least five weeks,” Previn says. “My conducting engagements went out the window, and, after the initial week, when boredom almost supplanted pain, I rigged a large board over my head, pinned score pages to it and started writing.

“Visually, it must have seemed like a Monty Python version of work on the Sistine Chapel.”

Previn finished the project in a month.

At the first performance in Royal Festival Hall, Previn recalls that “the audience laughed before a word was spoken (during the mimed section that opens the piece), was moved by the unfolding events, and cheered Tom to the rafters at the conclusion.”

Composing has long been a preoccupation for Previn, if not his first preoccupation.

“Think of me as a conductor who loves to compose, not as a composer who loves to conduct,” says the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “There is a big difference.”

That difference probably accounts for Previn’s relaxed attitude about composing. In recent seasons, he has written a piano concerto for Vladimir Ashkenazy, a guitar concerto for John Williams (the guitarist, not the conductor). He is now at work on his second cello concerto, this one for Yo-Yo Ma. He is also considering a violin concerto for his friend Itzhak Perlman. He says he loves “the surprise of a commission,” yet claims not to seek them out.

Backstage at the Pavilion of the Music Center, recently, for instance, the 57-year-old musician acknowledged that “I’d be very frustrated if I could never compose again. Doing it is part of me, and I never want to stop. But there are other things in my life.”

This perspective would explain in part why Previn can say, matter of factly, “I have no pretensions of competing with the Elliott Carters of this world.” Still, he remains an active composer, one whose works, though not numerous, seem to suffer not at all from being revived.

At the local premiere performances of “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,” Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Philharmonic’s Music Center neighbor, the Mark Taper Forum, will stage the work, with composer Previn conducting the Philharmonic.

The cast of actors, in order of speaking, will be Rene Auberjonois, David Dukes, Katherine McGrath, Remy Auberjonois (Rene’s son, playing Dukes’ son), Dakin Matthews and Joseph Maher.

“Every Good Boy” is a unique work, the composer and playwright believe, in that it is neither purely an orchestral piece with incidental narration nor a play with incidental music.

“The 75-minute playing time of the work is almost exactly divided half and half between talk and music,” the composer says. Furthermore, the interlocking of speech and symphonic sounds makes both elements virtually unperformable without each other.

The lasting public interest in the piece, Davidson says, has to do with its verbal assault on an unnamed repressive social system that imprisons people for their political opinions.

“This play connects two very important elements in Tom’s writing: His love of verbal and intellectual puzzles--shown in his use of the orchestra as a member of the cast--and his passionate concern over human rights and the freedom of the artist.”

Previn remembers that at the Vienna premiere (within months of the world premiere, in London) “the piece became a political football, with different factions attending either to cheer or boo the ideas in the play. Those people took it very seriously.

“But it’s not a political statement. It’s a theater piece.”

The work was written for the 25th anniversary of the coronation of Elizabeth II. But, like some other pieces d’occasion , this “play for actors and orchestra” has lasted well beyond its limited beginnings.

“No one could have been more surprised than Tom and I were, when it began to show up all over the place,” Previn says. “Right after the premiere, it was performed, in a number of different languages, in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Helsinki, Copenhagen. . . . Then it was given a run in London, a year later. And, in the nine years since the premiere, it has been performed at innumerable universities, everywhere.”

In 1978 it was introduced in this country (at Temple University in Philadelphia) by the Pittsburgh Symphony, which Previn led for the decade ending in 1984, when he accepted the post of music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. That premiere took place in Pittsburgh and Washington. It was also mounted by independent forces in runs at both the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and at the Kennedy Center in Washington a year later.

Talking about “Every Good Boy,” in his airy office/dressing room at the Music Center one afternoon recently, Previn agrees that “it is grim. No piece dealing with the subject of human rights is going to be anything else.

“But, as in all Stoppard plays--and this is definitely one of Tom’s plays, not something outside his main work--there are sometimes huge laughs.”

Playwright Stoppard, on the phone from London, says he would not describe this work as having a gloomy outlook: “Yes, this is more grim in subject matter than other plays I’ve written. But, in treatment, the point of view can be quite angry. It deals in the dark side.”

The play seems--no specific locales are provided in the text--to take place in a Soviet mental hospital, in a cell occupied by the two protagonists. The reasons for their imprisonments emerge during the action.

“Look, I’m not a pessimist in the deepest sense. Still, this is not an encouraging picture,” Stoppard admits.

What does the presence of a 110-member instrumental ensemble, in the middle of the stage, have to do with the scenario?

“The orchestra is a metaphor,” says Davidson--a longtime Stoppard interpreter, having staged both “Travesties” here in 1975 and “The Real Thing” last June.

“It is a metaphor for conformity. You see--either you’re in an orchestra or you’re out of an orchestra. And the fact that Ivanov can hear the orchestra, but the other characters cannot--that they do not accept its existence--adds to the metaphor.”

“Every Good Boy” works better in a symphonic hall than in a theater, Previn says, “because of the set-up (of the audience).

“In a symphonic space, people are always shocked when the orchestra plays, then is interrupted by the actors. There wouldn’t be that shock--which we intended--if this were happening in a theater, where the audience has every right to expect to see theatrical action.”

Previn’s musical style, the composer says without apology, is “conservative. I’m not old-fashioned, but I am conservative.”

The Shostakovichian and Prokofiev-esque character of much of the music of “Every Good Boy” is no accident, the composer explains, with some patience; he has been misunderstood on this point before.

“There is no cribbing here. Every bar is mine. But the nature of the play required a ‘Soviet’ sound in fully half of this music. I provided it, and have been criticized by some for doing so.” He shrugs, philosophically.

Rene Auberjonois, who has taken the role of the mad Ivanov--the two principals of the play are both named Alexander Ivanov--in two previous productions of “Every Good Boy,” acknowledges that he loves to repeat roles, this one in particular.

The first rehearsal with orchestra, Auberjonois says, is an experience never duplicated when he performs a play without music.

“It’s joyous, hearing that orchestra for the first time. And, playing Ivanov, who imagines that he is conducting the orchestra, gives one such a feeling of power. It’s really glorious.

“You raise your arms, and pow ! The orchestra plays a chord. I can’t describe it. The sound of that huge orchestra--it’s . . . sexual.”