HARRELL ADDS TEACHING TO HIS REPERTORY

What does a famous musician--a renowned soloist, the object of adulation, celebrity and respect, one at the peak of his technical powers--do when he reaches a plateau of musical and personal achievement?

“If he has any sense,” says Lynn Harrell, “he pulls back.”

The distinguished American cellist, in a move some might see as a classic mid-life decision, has decided to pull back. At 43, Harrell is clearly in his prime as a music maker. While he won’t deny that status, the tall, sandy-haired musician also views his present professional maturity “as a resource I want to share.”

This career, after all--and despite Harrell’s youthful appearance--is one that goes back to 1960, when he made his debut at 16 as soloist with the New York Philharmonic. Since then, he has earned a place among the elite of international soloists in appearances with major orchestras, on major recital stages and in numerous recordings.

Intensely analytical and quietly articulate, Harrell over the years has taught briefly at a number of conservatories and in master-class situations--most recently, a month ago at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute.

In two weeks, however, he will assume a new job, his first major teaching post. At the University of Southern California, Harrell will occupy the Gregor Piatigorsky Chair in cello. His teaching duties will allow him to continue full-time with his concert work.

Aside from a change of life style, Harrell says he and his wife decided to move to California--and academia--to reduce his traveling.

“In the last year, I gave, all told, 130 concerts. So slowing down seems like a necessity, if only for my health. But, of course, the benefits of going from 130 down to 95--which is what I’ll give between now and next August--go beyond just health.

“In the past, when I’ve gone out on the road, I was performing up to four times a week. Well, when you do that for three to six weeks at a stretch, it’s not possible to keep fresh. Or even sometimes to remember where you are.” But other needs besides fatigue must be addressed, he emphasizes.

“First, I want to have time with my family. Then, too, I require time away from performing, time in which I can reflect and add onto my repertory.”

Since February, Harrell says, he has been carrying around with him the score to Kodaly’s sonata for solo cello, a work he plans to learn and play. “I haven’t opened it yet,” he confesses.

The new teaching post will give Harrell his first chance to create his own class. At USC, the class will have 12 members, 10 of them new this year to the university, and chosen by Harrell after weeks of auditions. He was given the discretion of being able to award scholarships. But that, he says, did not necessarily prove a boon to the students.

“I was very stingy with the scholarship money, and for the reason that I feel that sometimes having to work outside of music--washing dishes for 10 or 20 hours a week, for example--is a very good thing for the students. It gives them an incentive they can’t get any other way. It may even give them the idea that they’re not so special. And that’s a good idea. I suppose it’s an old-fashioned concept, but I believe in it.”

The challenge of teaching, Harrell thinks, is integration.

“What is interesting to me in bringing to the students a lot of information and advice all at the same time is that I’ll be able to try to tie it together for them.

“Teaching technique is not that interesting--I can spend only so many hours explaining spiccato, or helping students make a bigger tone, before I grow tired. But applying technical solutions to musical problems, especially when the student seems to understand what you’re talking about, that’s satisfying.”

A month into his Los Angeles residency--he brought his family lock, stock and cellos here July 1--Harrell looks ready to relax. His most pressing summertime performances are now behind him, and his first day at the university is still weeks away.

The solidly built cellist sits comfortably in the large and airy living room of his recently renovated house in a canyon above Beverly Hills. Outside, and seen through a bank of tall windows, is a tree-shaded yard. “Not enough sunlight for the grass. We’ve got to replant,” Harrell notes.

Inside, an expanse of new floor, the contemporary furnishings comfortable but uncluttered, all of it lit in a subdued manner by skylights. That last performance is three days in the past. It’s time to look forward.

In a nearby den, Linda Blandford, Harrell’s wife and a longtime journalist, types her weekly column for the Guardian of London. The column used to be titled “An American Diary”; it is now called “Going West.” Their two children are visiting the beach. The only movement in the room is provided by a cat, aloof but curious, who looks in from time to time.

To be the first holder of the Piatigorsky Chair is of course an honor, and Harrell has said so publicly a number of times since the appointment was announced. Did he know Piatigorsky well?

“Pretty well, and over maybe 15 years. I played for him a lot, when I would pass through town. We had dinners and lunches, usually with his wife. And we spent time together. Yes, we were friends.”

A new generation of cellists now has reached the point where it needs the conservatory-type training Harrell received, 25 years ago, when he joined the Cleveland Orchestra as its principal cellist, rather than pursue the solo career full-time.

Of his preparation before joining the orchestra, he now says: “My training as a musician was really haphazard. When I began my career, I really knew very little about the world around music--literature, history, poetry, architecture.

“Like so many young musicians, I learned to play the instrument, I learned to emulate other players I admired and I relied on my instincts. But, for becoming an articulate and civilized musician, all of that is only the beginning.”

When Harrell’s late father, Mack, a Metropolitan Opera and concert baritone, is mentioned, the cellist willingly puts on a record. It contains, among other items, the elder Harrell’s singing of a Bach cantata and two Schubert songs, “An die Musik” and “Der Musensohn.” The pride the cellist takes in his father’s achievement is touching, especially as he points out one particularly moving passage in the Cantata No. 35, “Geist und Seele wird verwirret.”

The death of his father in 1960, just before Harrell’s 16th birthday, and the passing of his mother three years later, may have contributed to his decision to join the Cleveland Orchestra when he was 19. In 1962, he returned, without having won, from the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

“My teacher, Leonard Rose, told me at that time that I had two choices--to continue to enter contests, eventually winning one and finding a career through that route, or to join an orchestra” in order to make a living while preparing for a later assault on the solo career.

“I thought, ‘Well, if that way was good enough for Rose and Starker and Piatigorsky. . . .’ But there was more. I felt, in my gut, that I was not ready to go out there and give performances of the standard repertory, that I had not got to a place where I knew what I wanted to do with the major works.

“Again, I’m more traditional. In the next nine years, what I learned from being in an orchestra--not only musically, but socially--helped me get to the point where I felt I could walk on a stage and offer something for people to listen to.”

His mentor in Cleveland was none other than George Szell, the legendary musical autocrat and at that time music director of the orchestra. Szell challenged Harrell’s musical thinking and urged the young cellist himself to question every aspect of his music making.

Harrell’s other mentor, and still close friend, was his contemporary, pianist James Levine, the same Levine who heads the Metropolitan Opera. To this day, Harrell speaks with awe about Levine’s musical talents.

“With musicians of genius--and I apply this only to a very few people I have met in my life, people like Jimmy and Itzhak Perlman and Daniel Barenboim--their extraordinary talent is matched by an equal capacity for work.

Harrell doesn’t put himself in that category; indeed, he calls himself “lazy.” But he admits that “once I get interested in something, I can be compulsive. When I get started, as has happened a few times in my life with my big loves, there is no stopping me. It happened with tennis. It happened with chess. And, most recently, with art.”

Inspired by reading a biography of Sir Kenneth Clark, the author of “Civilization,” Harrell dipped into, and devoured, several books by the writer himself. Now he says he may be on the way to becoming expert on the Romantic period.

“I know so much more about the subject than I did before. I want to share it. I think of creating multidisciplinary studies where young people can absorb some of the history, the poetry, the architecture of the time. To put it all together. How can we play the music of Schumann if we don’t know a lot about what his times were like?”