“I never believed I was the most talented, but I had the determination to succeed.”
Mount Merrion native Gregory Harrington is about to play Carnegie Hall for the fifth time. He tells Marie Kelly why he never believed he was particularly gifted musician.
There’s a famous anecdote about the iconic concert venue Carnegie Hall, which goes like this: A pedestrian on 57th Street stopped the world-famous violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz and inquired, “Could you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?” “Yes,” replied Heifetz. “Practice!”
Award-winning Irish violinist Gregory Harrington, who will play his fifth and 20th anniversary performance at Carnegie Hall in February, may or may not have been familiar with the folklore around the prestigious midtown Manhattan venue, but he has never taken for granted what’s required to follow in the footsteps of his musical idols, Heifetz and Grammy award-winning Erick Friedman (the latter was his teacher).
“Seven-hour practice blocks, single hours working on open strings, understanding how every muscle works and defining how every note sounds,” is how the 48-year-old Mount Merrion native describes his professional routine. “If you want it badly enough, you’ll make time for it” has always been his reasoning. Like a top-level athlete, Harrington has ‘trained’ consistently, devoting long, arduous hours to his craft since he picked out his first instrument in McCullough Pigott on South William Street in Dublin at the age of just four.
Forty-four years later and Harrington’s CV appears as glamorous as the good luck charm Paloma Picasso Tiffany cufflinks he wears for every performance. He’s played for presidents, politicians, dignitaries and celebrities in some of the most prestigious venues around the world, from the Conservatorio Nacional in Mexico and Shanghai University to Universidade del Norte in Colombia and The National Concert Hall in Dublin. He’s collaborated with renowned orchestras including the San Diego Symphony, Mexico City Philharmonic, Rhode Island Philharmonic and the Janacek Philharmonic and worked with world-famous conductors such as Thomas Wilkins, Robert Houlihan, Mariusz Smolij and Mark Shapiro. Last year, Harrington was granted his US green card based on “extraordinary ability” in his field of expertise.
His impending performance at Carnegie Hall, a venue that has hosted concerts from legendary performers and musicians such as Glenn Miller, Judy Garland, Leonard Bernstein and Nina Simone, will be in the Weill Recital Hall, where he debuted, and is the culmination of 25 years’ of dedication to his craft. In signature Harrington style, he will take his audience on a musical journey from the violin and piano repertoire of Brahms and Bazzini to arrangements for strings and percussion originally performed by Led Zeppelin and the Cranberries. His unique ability to juxtapose genres has led to a cross-cultural, wide-ranging appeal enjoyed by few artists and aspired to by many.
“Seven-hour practice blocks, single hours working on open strings, understanding how every muscle works and defining how every note sounds,” is how the 48-year-old Mount Merrion native describes his professional routine.
Unbelievably, Harrington explains: “I never believed I was the most talented musician, but I had the determination and single-mindedness to succeed.” Combining the demands of a degree in business and Spanish at UCD with violin tuition from a great Russian soloist who lived in Leeds – he would fly there and study for a weekend every six weeks – is testament to his resolve to pursue his passion. Within two years of graduating, he attended Mannes College of Music in New York, one of the most select universities for serious young musicians. There, he studied with a teacher from arguably the world’s most elite performing arts schools, The Juilliard School, whose famous alumni include actors Robin Williams and Jessica Chastain, Jazz legend Miles Davis and influential composer Philip Glass.
Now based full-time in New York, Harrington says as a young musician, he did an analysis of what he was good at and not so good at. “My strength was an ability to communicate musically, but I didn’t have the technique I saw in some of my peers.” So he used every opportunity to get in front of an audience – be it black-tie galas or corporate events – and painstakingly perfected his technique, musicality and message. “These performances were critical to achieving my debut at Carnegie Hall in 2003,” he explains. This debut was the first time an Irish violinist had performed a full-length debut solo recital at the famous NYC landmark, and “It was magical,” Harrington recalls. “There was three feet of snow outside, Andrew Hetherington (the renowned Dublin-born, US-based photographer) was taking photographs, I had a fax in my hand from then-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern wishing me luck…it was a really beautiful experience.”
There have been several memorable performances between his first and soon-to-be fifth Carnegie Hall concert, including his rendition of the American national anthem for the NFL Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field before a crowd of 77,000 in 2017 and his glorious interpretation of Danny Boy on NBC Live for the opening of the St Patrick’s Day Parade on 5th Avenue in 2020. He also warmly remembers playing for the then US Vice President Joe Biden in 2013 when he was granted the Irish American Hall of Fame lifetime award. Chatting to Biden afterwards, Harrington remarks: “He was such a gracious man. We spoke about loss – my mother had recently passed away and he himself had suffered enormous grief with the death of his first wife and daughter – and he told me about his great grandfather, who was a blind fiddler from Co Louth. There was a really human connection between us,” reveals the artist.
Human connection is at the heart of Harrington’s art, and he is very much of the jazz composer Roy Ayers’ philosophy that “[Music] carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers.” The classical crossover violinist explains: “Performing is about transporting those people who come to see you play; it’s about moving them and mesmerising them, and changing their experience of that unique time and place.” For Harrington “Music is the shorthand of emotion”, to quote Leo Tolstoy.
The Dubliner speaks as passionately about communication as he does about music and when he’s not rehearsing, recording, producing or performing, he is a keynote speaker and consultant in the art of reaching an audience for chief executives keen to connect with their employees and colleagues in a more meaningful way. I love being on stage, whether that’s performing or speaking,” he says. “I can offer creative problem-solving through a completely different lens. I bring years of experience on global stages to the corporate world and use music as a metaphor for how to lead and motivate people.”
Gregory Harrington performing at Carnegie Hall in New York.
While Harrington advises every young musician to devote the time and energy required to perfect their art, he does admit that the years he spent studying business at university have stood to him. There’s nothing of the naive clichéd creative about Harrington. “Every musician, and creative, must learn how to market themselves because nobody can exist in a vacuum. How can you differentiate yourself from others? Who is going to like what you do, and pay for it? If you don’t know how to target your audience, then you won’t be able to target your source of income.” He adds pragmatically that there’s no point being the finest violinist if you’re not getting paid.
Harrington’s goal was always to be a touring musician and he has weathered the unpredictability of a career in the arts by offering a portfolio of products to his audience. Alongside his role as a keynote speaker, he can be booked for private corporate performances as well as one-to-one tuition in his New York teaching studio or online. “You have to see yourself as a commodity and diversify your skills so that you’re employable in different ways,” he explains. Certainly, teaching proved to be a fortuitous career move when Covid hit in 2020 and his principal source of earnings evaporated within a matter of weeks.
Harrington has one brother living in Ireland, who followed in their father’s footsteps as an engineer, and he credits his own success in no small part to his late father’s unerring belief in him. “He always felt that there was nobody better than his son. The pride he had in me was very special. He believed the sky was the limit.” His father travelled to all of Harrington’s performances well into his eighties until he passed away seven years ago, and there’s obviously a precious memory bank of moments that Harrington holds close to his heart. “Our relationship evolved in a really lovely way. There’s nothing that I would have done differently.”
Given everything that Harrington has achieved to date and the fact that he is only mid-way through his career, the sky does, indeed, seem to be the limit. When he was in university, the tenacious young man wrote a list of 50 achievements he wanted to accomplish in the future. So far he’s ticked 27 off that list. What’s left? “Collaborations with icons, bigger venues, a broader audience…I’ve buckets more to do,” he says excitedly. “Oh,” he adds, “and a performance at The White House!” Harrington is the epitome of the old maxim ‘Dream big, work hard, stay humble’.
Originally published in Sunday Independent Life, February 2023