In Tuesday’s (12/11) Dallas Morning News, Scott Cantrell reports, “Marion Davies, a former principal cellist of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and one of the first women to hold principal chairs in major American orchestras, died Saturday in Durham, N.C. She was 88. Davies had moved to North Carolina in 1995, after retiring from the DSO. Davies held the DSO’s principal cello chair from 1975 to 1987. She retained the title co-principal cellist, sitting in various chairs, until her retirement. In 1988, along with DSO bassist Dwight Shambley, she co-founded the Young Strings program to give free training and performance opportunities, sometimes even instruments, to young minority string students. The program has been maintained by the DSO since 1992. Davies also taught cello at Southern Methodist University and, before coming to Dallas, at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. … After early training at the San Francisco Conservatory, Davies studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with two of the most famous cellists of the 20th century, Emanuel Feuermann and Gregor Piatigorsky. Before coming to Dallas, she was principal cellist of the Houston Symphony and, before that, the Kansas City Philharmonic.”
Posted December 12, 2012
