CSO news round-up: a gifted artist dies young, another wins a big post in Los Angeles, and Perahia steps in for an ailing Pollini

Dale Clevenger, Avis Herseth, and Alice Render Clevenger

• Alice Render Clevenger, 50, died Wednesday at her Winnetka home.

A regular supplemental player in the CSO horn section since 1984, she was a person of uncommon bravery, strength, and high spirits.

Given a four-month prognosis when diagnosed with an aggressive cancer in 2003, she fought back and hard and stretched her rich life for eight more years, continuing through treatments and pain to play and tour with the CSO, teach at Roosevelt and elsewhere, raise her family, and compete in triathlons.

She and longtime CSO principal horn Dale Clevenger were married in 1988 and have two sons, Mac, of Washington, D.C., and Jesse, a horn student at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, his mother’s alma mater. Alice is also survived by her parents, Edwin R. and Joyce Render, a brother and a sister.

Services will be at 2 p.m. Monday at Christ Church, Episcopal, 784 Sheridan Rd. in Winnetka.  Memorial donations may be made to Susan G. Komen for the Cure , 8765 West Higgins Road, Suite 401, Chicago 60631.

• Nathan Cole (above), a valued member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first violin section since 2002, has been appointed first associate concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, effective July 4.

Cole, a gifted soloist, chamber musician, teacher, and writer, will continue to lead the summer UBS Chamber Music Festival that he founded in his native Lexington, Ky.

Cole’s wife and fellow CSO section member, Akiko Tarumoto, also has won a violin audition with Los Angeles, where she had played from 2000 to 2004 before joining the CSO.  They re-met and married in Chicago and will be greatly missed here. 

• Due to illness, Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini has called off his U.S. spring tour, including his late-Beethoven April 10 recital here.

London-based American pianist Murray Perahia, who canceled his own scheduled dates earlier this season due to an injury, will substitute with a mixed program of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, and Chopin.  For details, (312) 294-3000 or cso.org.