Genial giant of the cello thinks big

For a musician who's had every imaginable honour, Lynn Harrell still feels there are big opportunities ahead. HEATH LEES reports.

Everything about Lynn Harrell says BIG. Bear-like yet genial, his large form glides out of the hotel lift and it's some time before you can discern the shape of his priceless Montagnana cello in its case and strapped to his back.

Looking less like a cellist and more like a successful, hands-on oil millionaire from Texas, the state where he went to high school, Harrell unclips the cello and steadies it beside him with a single, deft movement before relaxing into a chair that suddenly seems small.

From the start you can tell that his experience of life has been big, too. This is a man whose teenage life was traumatised in the late 1950s when he was 15, and his father died of cancer. Two years later his mother was killed in a car crash.

"I closed up emotionally," he says frankly. "I still played, of course - even then - but it took some years, much playing and a few really good teachers before I was able to open up again. The human spirit is incredibly resilient though, and I was lucky in having mentors who kept my musical ambitions alive."

One of these, cellist Leonard Rose at the Juilliard School of Music, Harrell remembers with great affection. "Rose respected the different personalities of each student, and helped them to develop. Both Yo-Yo Ma and I studied with him. We have a very solid foundation technically, but we sound quite different, which is partly because he was so open and supportive."

It seems like a good moment to ask him about that famous, fluid and colourful "Harrell sound" that people talk about, a big sound yet pure and expressive.

"For a long time I didn't even know I had the Harrell sound," he says. "I don't try to cultivate it; I just aim to play as well as I can. To be honest, much of the credit belongs to the instrument itself." He nods towards the Montagnana.

I ask him about his equally priceless Stradivarius cello. "The Strad is darker, more wistful, but the Montagnana, while not actually bright, is certainly vibrant. I don't keep each for a certain repertoire though. I tend to swap them around just for variety. And they get tired, too. They have ways of telling you when they need a rest, while you're tuning them up. They're not so much partners as friends."

At 16, Harrell made his first concert appearance with the New York Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall, and from 1965 to 1971 he was principal cellist of the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell, before his solo career propelled him on to the world stage as concerto soloist, chamber musician, recitalist, conductor, teacher, and recording artist.

Does he miss the company of orchestral players now, in the lonelier world of the soloist?

"Oh yes," he replies immediately, "but there are compensations. Like getting all the credit when things go well. I love praise. If someone comes round after a concert and tells me I must have heard what they're going to say so often, I say, 'Yes, but tell me again'."

Playing in New Zealand for the first time, Harrell is midway through a month-long tour that will also take him around Asia and South Africa. When he gets back to the United States, he takes up a new job as eminent professor at Rice University in Houston, and his big personality expands even more at the thought of teaching.

A New Yorker by birth, he grew up in Texas - the Big State - and he thinks of it as home.

Perhaps surprisingly for a musician who has had every imaginable honour and award, Harrell still feels that there are big opportunities ahead. Like his regular features on the internet webcasting service of GMN Arts Network, which has "live" performances for streaming and downloading the latest classical performances.

Harrell has more than 30 CDs and several Grammy awards to his credit. He is concerned about the "too-perfect" types of performances that digital editing produces. His live playing for the GMN webcasts has virtually no post-editing, though the orchestral parts are always cleaned up later.

"Not me," says this big man, with a suitably big laugh. "What you hear is what I play."

Auckland will hear it live for the first time this weekend. It promises to be a big occasion.