Andre Previn at 80

Like a reluctant witness after a shoot-out, André Previn peers around the door of his flat, gripping the door frame and watching me approach down the dim corridor. We're high in a portered block on Manhattan's Upper East Side where Previn - tiny, beaky, full of amused dismay at the world and the generally unsatisfactory nature of the people in it - lives when he isn't touring. Inside, a grand piano takes up most of the living room. How ever did they get it up here? Previn blinks, as if he had never considered it. "I have no idea."

The composer will be 80 next year, the age of lifetime achievement awards, which sometimes feel to him like obituaries and make him want to scream: "But I'm still working!" There was the Glenn Gould prize and the honorary knighthood, and now Gramophone magazine is giving him a gong for outstanding contribution to the something or other. "It's not the Pulitzer prize and it's not the Nobel prize and it's not the Drama Critics prize. Still, it's very nice of Gramophone, which I've read all my life." His voice is high and dreamy and slightly arcane-sounding, like the Tin Man's. "I don't," he says, "tend to take myself all that seriously," though there is an edge to his teasing that I wouldn't like to see fully blown.

The work hasn't let up. The day after we meet, Previn will fly to Munich to perform with his fifth and (to date) final ex-wife, Anne-Sophie Mutter, the violinist he rather sweetly calls "my best friend". He is conducting the London Symphony Orchestra at Christmas and has a new opera opening in Houston in the spring. Based on Brief Encounter, it uses some of Noël Coward's original script together with a libretto by the British writer John Caird - a return in spirit, perhaps, to Previn's first career as a film scorer at MGM. Between 1958 and 1964 he won four Academy awards for his original music, including work on Gigi and Porgy & Bess. But no, he says, writing Brief Encounter was not like writing a film score. "Do you know I haven't set foot in a movie studio in, wait a second, 30 ... in 43 years? There is a statute of limitations. People shouldn't bring it up." He smiles dangerously.

Lots of other things annoy Previn. Travel: "That bloody airport. You get shunted around. Too awful." Technology: "I don't even have a cell phone. I don't know how they work." The marketing of classical music. He is particularly irritated by Lang Lang, the hugely successful Chinese pianist who throws himself about at the piano like Elton John. "It's a circus act, you know? Why doesn't he just come out and juggle? He's an amazing pianist, but I can't watch, not for one minute. And yet he is probably the biggest box-office success in the world, for a classical musician." Mind you, he says, there have always been people willing to muck around to get publicity. "And sometimes, in the case of Bernstein - well, even there, I wasn't all that crazy about it, but I thought the music-making was quite remarkable." He doesn't think Lang Lang will last. "People will get tired of all the shenanigans."

Previn's disdain for showing off comes from his 16 years in Hollywood. He joined MGM while still a schoolboy in Los Angeles, in 1946, and turned down the offer of finishing his education at the studio's in-house school, where he would have been a classmate of Liz Taylor's. He had come to the attention of the music department after doing arrangements for a local radio show. Though the adolescent Previn was awestruck by the studio, even then something in him militated against being wholly consumed by it.

For the next 16 years he scored dozens of movies with what he calls "commercial cornball music". He made good money and had a secure job. But he felt trapped, and his father, who had his own demons, thought he was wasting his talent. The family, who were Jewish, had been forced to flee the Nazis when Previn was 10, leaving everything behind in Germany, most problematically his father's career as a successful barrister. In his new country he became a piano teacher. "My father couldn't practise law because he didn't know the language. I never realised until much later in my life that he was really quite a hero. He left Germany, didn't have a dime, didn't speak the language, had a family, and yet he managed to get us through it. That was an act of heroism. But I never got along with him all that well."

Previn also realised after the fact that his own success at MGM must have been difficult for his father. "Because I was working hard and I was making strides. And he wasn't. But he was a remarkable man."

And his mother?

"And my mother - " He smiles. "I could do no wrong."

At the age of 32, to the horror of his peers, Previn resigned from the studio to concentrate on his classical career. "At MGM you knew you were going to be working next year, you knew you were going to get paid. But I was too ambitious musically to settle for it. And I wanted to gamble with whatever talent I might have had."

His faith in himself was, of course, borne out. But though he admits he was cocky, he says he has never become an intolerable egotist, not the stereotypical maestro. "When you're working with music that is invariably better than you are, it's difficult to become swell-headed." He chuckles. "It's true."

There were a few wilderness years before his big break at the Houston Symphony Orchestra and, from there, his 11-year tenure as principal conductor at the LSO. He wound up living back in Germany at one point, which I imagine was difficult. German is his first language (French his second, English his third) and he still uses it for the alphabet, days of the week and basic arithmetic. But there must, surely, have been bitterness towards the country to overcome? There is a long pause. "No. I was - I was selfish enough and then realistic enough to know that as a musician I really had to go back there. It never bothered me. I mean, I'm aware of it. But it never bothered me in terms of, 'What did they do to my family?' No. It's not a big drama."

It is England he misses now. He lived there with Mia Farrow, his third wife, for most of the 1970s, in an idyllic house in Surrey. ("Not in the stockbroker part.") Those were the glory years, when the LSO was frequently on television and Previn's youthful looks and shaggy hair became well known. Astonishingly, he and the orchestra made an average of 14 albums a year. "And now it's two. Somebody told me classical records constitute less than 1% of the sales of records. So I say, let's not even talk about doing a Tchaikovsky symphony. Let's do some Tippett or some Messiaen, or something. But then, who the hell is going to buy that? Nobody buys anything any more. It's all a crapshoot."

It is sometimes claimed that the best classical composers are working in the film industry: Morricone, John Williams, even Andrew Lloyd Webber. Previn worked on the scoring for the film version of Jesus Christ Superstar, as a favour to his friend Norman Jewison, who directed. "I'm not a great fan of Lloyd Webber's. He doesn't need me to be a fan. Believe me." And the others? He winces. "John Williams is without question talented. He writes very good scores and very good melodies and all that. But, no, of the others ... You know, when I hear Titanic - James Horner - which was a huge hit, it's the same 16 bars played 185 times. It's not interesting." His favourite composer of theatre music is Harold Arlen; his favourite lyricist is Sondheim; beyond that, there isn't much to excite him in musical theatre these days. "Those awful Disney musicals - mermaids with long eyelashes, that's not interesting."

Orchestras have changed, too. In the 1970s the LSO players were, says Previn, "pretty much of a rowdy crowd. Going on a tour with them was unbelievable. There was a great deal of inimitably great playing, and also astonishingly bad behaviour." He lights up at the memory and says it was like being on a school trip. "And now they show up in a suit. They play fabulously well, but ... " He tails off. Even at their rowdiest, the LSO never gave him a hard time, even though he was young and relatively inexperienced. "No. It's only when they think you're faking that they can't forgive you. That's good. I agree with that."

Those years in London and Surrey were some of the happiest of his life. Previn and Farrow had six children, three of whom they adopted from the far east. Despite his European sensibility, he found England occasionally mystifying. Previn belonged to the Garrick club, and one day the secretary invited him to bring Farrow to dinner there. "I said, 'OK, I'll tell her, she might enjoy it very much.' He said, 'Yes, oh and by the way, you must forgive me for this but she can't use the main staircase. The women have to go round the back.' And I said, 'What?' And I went home and told Mia and she said, 'You have 10 minutes in which to quit the club.' And I said, 'I've already done it.' Unbelievable. Mia was the wrong person to try that on."

They are still friends; he sees her frequently in New York. One of his children rings during the interview, and while speaking to her his accent becomes noticeably more American. "Darling, no, I'm fine. I'm fine, honey. Oh yes. Thanks a lot, honey. Do that, sweetie. All right, darlin'. Bye bye." He admires his ex-wife a lot. "She goes to Darfur like other people go to New Jersey. She does a lot of good there."

One of his sons is a rock guitarist who took up the instrument because it was one of the few his father had no knowledge of. "I couldn't blame him." He plays for an obscure group, but is very successful, says Previn. "Because when I say successful I mean he plays well and he likes what he's playing. That's success."

The last time he heard a piece of new music that really set him on fire was when he was a teenager, listening to Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra. But he still gets excited at new renditions of old pieces; he heard Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes at the Metropolitan Opera House last month - "That just floored me. My God, what a piece." Does it depress him, the gap between the ideal of how a piece of music might be and what it is in reality? "It can't be helped. It works in both directions. I sometimes hear a piece of mine and there will be moments in it that are better than I thought they'd be. And then there will be moments when I think I should have done better. The only thing that always works is mediocrity. As soon as you try for the bull's eye you could also miss the whole target."

And has he had many misses?

"Oh, darling, are you kidding? Any number of things. But I've written some things I like. I quite liked Streetcar. I hope I like Brief Encounter. I love the violin concerto that I wrote for Anne-Sophie. I like my quartet." Next, he'd like to do an opera for A Man for All Seasons. "We'll see."

And regrets? A big sigh. "Privately, yes. I've made some very poor choices in my private life. But as a professional, no, not really."

A few years ago, he took a drive past his old house in Surrey. He saw that the new owner had subdivided his beloved woods at the back into nine separate lots. It was unbelievably painful. "I thought, I can't see this." And he vowed, as he tends to, not to go back.