Obituary, Lynn Harrell (1944-2020)

The American cellist Lynn Harrell, who won Grammys for his chamber music recordings with Vladimir Ashkenazy and Itzhak Perlman, has died aged 76.

The son of baritone Mack Harrell and violinist Marjorie Fulton, Harrell was born in New York in 1944 and began playing the cello aged nine, going on to train at the Juilliard School of Music (where his teachers included Leonard Rose) and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Even before commencing conservatoire study Harrell was making a name for himself on the competition circuit, reaching the semi-finals of the International Tchaikovsky Competition (for which he was later a juror himself) at eighteen; he joined the ranks of the Cleveland Orchestra shortly afterwards, becoming their principal cellist in 1964.

Harrell left the Cleveland Orchestra in 1971 and began attracting serious attention as a soloist the following year, after The New York Times observed that ‘This young man has everything’ in a review of a performance at Lincoln Center; three years later he was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, and later that year began his recording career in earnest with a recital of Prokofiev, Debussy and Webern and an account of the Dvořák Cello Concerto (both with James Levine on RCA).

In 1981 he joined forces with Vladimir Ashkenazy and Itzhak Perlman to record Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio ‘In Memory of a Great Artist’, which won a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Recording, and was described as ‘still a clear choice’ for the work by Gramophone just a couple of years ago. The three went on to repeat their success seven years later with a set of the complete Beethoven Piano Trios, and also recorded Brahms, Ravel and Debussy together to great acclaim. Harrell and Ashkenazy became regular collaborators in the recording studio in their own right, both in concerto and cello/piano repertoire: their joint discography includes sonatas by Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Beethoven and Brahms, and works for cello and orchestra by Bruch, Prokofiev, Dvořák, and Strauss. He also worked frequently with musicians including Stephen Kovacevich, Zubin Mehta, Bernard Haitink, André Previn, Nigel Kennedy, and Anne-Sophie Mutter - a cameo appearance on the latter’s John Williams album Across the Stars last year is one of his final recordings.

Aside from core repertoire, Harrell also championed numerous lesser-known works, giving Victor Herbert’s Cello Concerto No. 1 its world premiere on disc in the late 1980s and also making an acclaimed recording of Henri Dutilleux’s Tout un monde lointain… (written for Rostropovich) with Charles Dutoit and the Orchestre National de France.

Teaching was a key element of Harrell’s work throughout his career (and in fact my own cello teacher was one of his former students); he took up a position at the University of Cincinnati in 1971, and subsequently taught at institutions including the Juilliard, the Aspen Festival (where his father had been a regular tutor), and the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he was principal from 1993-95. He also undertook a significant amount of charity-work, establishing the HEARTbeats Foundation – an organisation devoted to providing music therapy for vulnerable children - with his violinist wife Helen Nightengale in 2010; the project received support from musicians including John Williams, Jessye Norman, Joan Baez and Paul Simon.

Harrell died on 27th April; the conductors Leonard Slatkin and Alan Gilbert, and fellow cellists Alisa Weilerstein and Gautier Capuçon were among those who paid tribute to him on social media.

Lynn Harrell - a selected discography