Lynn Harrell

Lynn Harrell (born January 30, 1944) is an American classical cellist. Harrell was born to musician parents in New York City: his father was the baritone Mack Harrell and his mother, Marjorie McAlister Fulton (1909–1962), was a violinist. At the age of eight, he decided to learn to play the cello. When he was 12, his family moved to Dallas, Texas, where he studied with Lev Aronson (1912–1988). After attending Denton High School, Harrell studied at the Juilliard School in New York with Leonard Rose and then at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with Orlando Cole. He made his debut in 1961 playing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. In 1960, when Harrell was 15, his father died of cancer. In November 1962, when he was 18, his mother died from injuries sustained from a two-vehicle crash while traveling from Denton to Fort Worth with pianist Jean Mainous to perform a recital; she was violinist in residence (faculty) at the University of North Texas College of Music, . Just before his mother had died, in April 1962, Harrell had withdrawn from Denton High School in his junior year to advance to the semifinals of the Second International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. After losing his mother, as Harrell put it, "I moved around to different family friends' houses with my one suitcase and cello until I was 18, when I joined the Cleveland Orchestra. In part, I got that job because George Szell knew my father through their collaboration at the Metropolitan Opera." Harrell was a cellist with the Cleveland Orchestra and its principal cellist from 1964 to 1971.