Riccardo Muti mourns Chicago’s glorious horn

Menahem Pressler says:

I am deeply saddened by the loss of my dear, much admired friend and colleague. His studio is near mine at Jacob’s School of Music in Bloomington and it was always a joy to see him and talk on our way to or from teaching. He was a delightful warm human being as well as a magician with his instrument. My profound condolences to Giovanna and his children.

David K. Nelson says:

There is quite a bit of early biographical information about Dale Clevenger and in particular how he broke into music as a young man, in William Barry Furlong’s 1974 book “Season With Solti.” He didn’t start playing horn until he was 13 (switching from trumpet which he started at 11) and by 16 was playing professionally in the Chattanooga Symphony. It included playing in Radio City Music Hall, Broadway pit orchestras, pop band recordings, commercial jingles, and subbing with many orchestras including on tour. It also mentions his conducting ambitions at that time. And interestingly, he lamented that except for Mason Jones in Philadelphia, he and other principal horns in the US did not have the situation that many of their finest European counterparts have, or had at that time: every first horn was a professor and often had been the teacher for the rest of the horn section. As he put it in the book “In America, it’s hard to make a [horn] section.”

Back in the 1970s the small-city Wisconsin orchestra I played in for a few years had a nice relationship with the Chicago Symphony where first chair players would “use” our orchestra if they were working on a concerto to be eventually performed with the CSO. We were far enough away from Chicago that we were not diluting anything for the CSO appearance.

Dale Clevenger made the drive north and was our soloist in the Richard Strauss Horn Concerto No. 1. He was of course gloriously flawless, and our own horn section was extremely excited to have the chance to hear what he and his horn could do in our hall (which as happens often, sounded so much better empty at rehearsal than with an audience absorbing the reverb), playing entirely soloistically, no holding back when Strauss called for power. It was a horn sound you do not encounter often “live” — it was like hearing a recording cranked up loud, but never brittle or thin. It was hard even for a string player not to be envious because in addition to being the top horn in the top orchestra, the then-young Clevenger looked like a stage actor or a professional model for dress shirt advertisements. And you could not but be charmed by his Southern drawl, although he was mostly all-business and not as amiable as Adolph Herseth who kept strolling over to chat with or tell stories about conductors to those of us in the first violin section (“well if I was at work tonight I wouldn’t be playing Hummel, I’d be playing Ravel’s Rhapsodie espagnole.” Our orchestra was OK but could not imagine tackling that piece).

Robert Levin says:

This is shocking and very sad news. Dale was one of the preeminent horn players of our time – his solo in the 1969 RCA recording of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony with Ozawa and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is simply sublime, perhaps the best on any commercial recording of the work. I represented him for several years as a soloist and conductor and found him to be a very decent human being as well as an incredible instrumentalist and excellent orchestra leader. It was unfortunate that he didn’t retire sooner form the CSO, but those last few years have already been forgotten and he will always be remembered as a towering French horn player, one of the very greatest of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. RIP Dale.