Clutch Baritone

Whenever there is a tough baritone part to be sung these days, the call is likely to go to a modest 42-year-old Texan named Mack Harrell. In his 15 years as a professional, he has sung such larynx-cracking roles as the lead in Wozzeck and Rabbi Azrael in The Dybbuk; last season he gave more concerts with orchestra than any other U.S. baritone. Last week, at a time when most hard-working men were snoozing in vacation hammocks, Mack Harrell was still at it: singing Virgil Thomson's intricate new Five Songs of William Blake at Aspen.

A careful artist who doesn't believe in rushing his career, Harrell did not even make up his mind to become a singer until he was 24. He took to music as soon as he was big enough to crank up his mother's phonograph in Celeste, Texas. But he liked the violin music on those old records better than the vocals of Galli-Curci and Caruso. When he was twelve, he coaxed his mother into giving him a year's worth of violin lessons. Twelve penny-pinching years later, he concluded that his fingers were too stubby. Then a Philadelphia singing teacher told him he had a voice.

It was four more years before Harrell's concert career started with a tour of Europe. Soon after that, he took a fling at the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air ("I wasn't much interested in opera, but I thought it would be fun"), was more surprised than anybody else when he won. Since a contract with the company was part of the prize, "that sort of threw me into opera." He gradually worked into leading roles: Papageno in the Magic Flute, Golaud in Pelleas and Melisande.

Word got around that Harrell was a singer who never choked in the clutch of modern music. Without so much as raising his sun-bleached eyebrows, he spoke the rhythmically complex narrator's part in the world premiere of Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon with the Philharmonic in 1944, sang the lead in Bernard Rogers' opera The Warrior at the Met in 1947.

Now married to one of his fellow violin students and living in Larchmont, N.Y., Harrell still likes to sing the classics, especially the part of Christ in the St. Matthew Passion. But he thinks casting directors expect him to be good at learning difficult modern scores because of the thorough musical training he got studying the violin. On Baritone Harrell's schedule for next winter: parts in Milhaud's Christopher Columbus (with the Philharmonic-Symphony) and Stravinsky's Rake's Progress at the Metropolitan Opera.

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