Our work with HEARTbeats Foundation, a non-profit organization that my wife, Helen Nightengale, and I set up for helping children around the world to better cope with the circumstances of their lives, is one of the most gratifying parts of my professional career that now is over 50 years in the running. It is particularly a joy that my relationship with WFMT in Chicago has been there for me for so many years as well; it was in 1966 that I first performed live for the station, and in a few weeks I will be going to Chicago to continue that tie with more music.

My friendship with great artists over the years has given me immense vital input to this human growth aspect of what music can and does mean: I have been changed in many ways to what our art is, and can mean to people. These friends’ excitement on joining us is truly amazing: The immeasurable talent of Christine Brewer, Randy Kerber’s remarkable arrangement of the great song, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” by Harold Arlen, and the great composer, John Williams, who took time to conduct this for us, was an amazing gift. By the way, when we were doing this recording we realized that we were in the same space, the same sound stage that was used in the late 30′s for Judy Garland’s recording of it for “The Wizard of Oz.” We all felt something very special indeed that afternoon: music can reach parts of our collective past that is, well, a religious experience.

I believe you can listen to the station online at their website, http://www.wfmt.com.

So when the opportunity comes around to take part in a section, I’m always happy to take advantage. It doesn’t happen as often and under the right circumstances as much as I would like but one recent occasion came around to participate in the LA Opera’s production of the Ring Cycle. I happened to be free and this would offer the chance to play alongside my wife and so many other wonderful colleagues.

What greater joy than to partake in recreating this monumental masterpiece that I have not been able to do in my life! For sure, I played some of the orchestral excerpts with Szell in the Cleveland orchestra in the early 70′s. It is only the second Immolation scene that I have played. That was a few summers ago with Donald Runnicles and Christine Brewer at the Grand Teton Music festival and it was an absolutely unforgettable experience. And I will even say that sometimes as a soloist I am frustrated that I can only do the solo part!

But, I suppose there are people who cannot imagine that someone in my position would not want to be in the spotlight all the time. Well, the answer to that is a resounding “no.” I would prefer, really, if the listener is confronted with the MUSIC! It has enriched my life immeasurably and that I have gotten such credit along the way is only peripherally meaningful. I am free to play only this one of the four.

I told Placido Domingo the Musical Director of the company, that I was so sorry not to play the Walkure! I said, “I’d make that storm at the beginning have basketball-sized rain drops!!” Hopefully, that opportunity will come around sooner than later.

“Your father was such a good musician- what happened to you?” He continued, “ You don’t know the music, you are staring at your part, as if seeing it for the first time, you don’t know how to play with the conductor or your colleagues and the other choirs of the orchestra!”

I, of course, at 18 was in tears. But I recognized that he was right. And the greatest journey of my education began.

My second year in the orchestra (1964) James Levine was invited to come to work and study with Szell. We renewed our friendship, having met in aspen when Jim was a pianist in some of my fathers vocal classes, and I started to see what a prepared musician should be! Wow! I had so much work, study, and practice to do to live up to the Harrell name. Shortly after I met Walter Levin, Jim’s teacher and 1st violin of the great La Salle quartet. I subsequently performed with them and recorded the Schubert C major quintet.

After 8 years in Cleveland having moved up to the Principal position, and having played the solos and only once in a concerto, I left the orchestra because I wanted to expand my horizons. If that meant more solo playing so be it. But I did miss playing the great literature for the orchestra. And I did not want necessarily to become a soloist; I just wanted to play good music well. The accent here is on good music and playing it well. Whether I would be famous or not just didn’t figure into the equation.

Shortly after I left the orchestra I was awarded the Avery Fisher Award, which meant so much to me psychologically. Here I was being awarded for my work, my daily work, not because of a special effort at a one off performance or audition. It was such a boost to my confidence.

I have been blessed with great musicians in my collaborations; La Salle quartet, Perlman, Zukerman, Mutter, Laredo, Ricci, Shum sky, Repine, Kremer, Kalakos, Brooks Smith, Levine, Ashkenazy, Achenbach, Kovacevich, and so many wise conductors who invariably made suggestions to me, particularly when I was just starting out.

My early managers, Herbert Barrett and the late Samuel Niefeld were wonderfully supportive and helped in shaping my career growth and guided me wisely with not accepting some things that I wasn’t in a position to understand why not; that I was not ready for.

Perhaps the one most meaningful and transforming moment in my career was playing Kol Nidre in the Vatican for Pope Jean Paul in 1994. This was a special concert in the Vatican with the chief Rabbi of Rome in attendance that was organized for the commemoration of the Holocaust (which had not been formally acknowledged by the Pope and the Vatican) and the twenty million Jews who were lost in the concentration camps. Lev Aronson was one who survived 5 years in the camps. Now I was able to play for him and in his memory give back some of what he gave me. It was made into a VHS tape but never, to my knowledge made it into the DVD format.

The main cello teacher in town was a woman and my parents felt after the close association with Ruby Wenzel in Westchester N.Y. that I needed a male teacher. So, slightly nervous that this would not be a good move they contacted Lev Aronson, principal of the Dallas symphony, a brilliant pupil of Piatigorsky in Berlin before the war.

Well, he was totally captivating and I am so pleased that there is a life story of Lev just recently published: “The lost cellos of Lev Aronson” by Frances Brent. He was, for a young boy finding his own way with music, a mesmerizing influence. That I very quickly shared with him the overpowering world of music in a way that I somehow couldn’t with my parents was our secret. Lessons lasting over two hours sometimes were the norm and when one of my parents would collect me they somehow sensed not to intrude on our lessons or what we were doing.

Lev told them at dinner at my house after a few weeks that I was a great, great talent and destined to change the world of cello playing, they didn’t really think beyond his saying something complementary to his hosts. I seem to remember them answering, “ That’s lovely Lev, would you like some more roast beef?” It was memorable two or three years later when at my father’s funeral Lev played with some other musicians of the Dallas Symphony. He was, for sure, now my musical father and guided me.

And like a parent I must have had my turn at rebelling: A carte blanche scholarship was arranged with Piatigorsky in Los Angeles and I turned it down, because I wanted to stay in the east with my friends from the Juilliard School and Curtis Institute rather than go to California and “never come back.”

It was part of a battle that I had with Lev already a few years before; I loved Leonard Rose’s playing more than Piatigorsky’s. This may have been only that Rose’s playing was young and vital and so magnificent and that Piatigorsky’s was not on the same high level of technical assurance that it had been in the 30’s and 40’s. I had the opportunity of playing that winter when Lev and I were virtually not on speaking terms, with the New York Philharmonic on a Young Peoples’ concert narrated by Leonard Bernstein.

I suppose that losing a parent at 15 is a blow, but then to lose the other at seventeen was devastating. My mother was in a car accident on the way to a recital in Fort Worth Texas. We had moved to Denton from Dallas after my father’s death, perhaps because my mother could not afford staying in Dallas. I am not sure. But moving away from our home was an upheaval that was felt by everyone in my family.

Suddenly, I was without any anchor and support. There were, for sure, many well-meaning friends, but the reality of 3 children needing some family and continuity was another story. 17, 18, and 22 were our ages then. In a way, since I had the cello and music that my brother and sister did not, perhaps even so being the youngest of the three, I was the one who was more equipped to manage to find my footing.

Robert Shaw intervened and I went to Cleveland to play for Szell. It was an audition without orchestral music because there was no vacancy at the time. But it was a little later that I was offered a position in the orchestra. Obviously because Szell knew and had worked with my father at the Met Opera, he assumed I was of similar ilk.

In Part 2, I’ll pick up with my years playing in the Cleveland Orchestra under Szell, a music director that had no trouble telling me what he thought of my playing