Category Archive for: ‘Concert Events’

My father, bass-baritone Mack Harrell

I’m in Moscow right now as a judge for the XIV International Tchaikovsky Competition but I wanted to post a note letting everyone know that today at 4:00pm Central Time, 98.7 WFMT is going to broadcast Song My Father Taught Me, which I’ve been recording with them for the past year. The program looks back on my own career and on that of my father, bass-baritone Mack Harrell. My special thanks to Louise Frank from WFMT for producing the program and putting so much of her own heart and soul into this as well as my friend and collaborator Victor Santiago Asuncion. Even if you don’t live in the Chicago area, you can still listen to the program at wfmt.com.

I’ll be writing more about the competition very soon as today is our first day off since arriving so stay tuned!

click to watch the videos

I have four new videos available of myself and pianist Yuja Wang performing Rachmaninoff’s Cello Sonata in G Minor, Op. 19 at the 2008 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.  Audio and Video Produced and Engineered by Matthew Snyder of Matthew Snyder Recordings. Festival artistic director Marc Neikrug, executive director Steven Ovitsky, and everyone at the festival do a wonderful job and it is always a pleasure to perform here.

It has been now 15 years since I performed Bruch’s Kol Nidre at the Vatican for a concert commemorating the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust . The memory continues to vibrate my soul and I think of these ten minutes of music in my career and life as a seminal to my personality growth as an artist and man.

With Gilbert Levine conducting, the Philharmonia of London was brought to Rome especially for this event. Levine spent years working in Poland where he met John Paul II and started talking with him about a possible event that would be meaningful for both Christians and Jews with the theme of a memorial for the Jews who died in the war. At that time, the Pope-to-be confessed having had school friends who were taken away and never seen of again, making the time very alive and real in this holy man’s psyche.