From the Philadelphia Inquirer -

   Posted on Tue, Jun. 04, 2002

   On Music | Oboist's special sound survives his passing
   By Peter Dobrin
   Inquirer Staff Writer

   It rarely works out this way, but you didn't have to listen too hard
   to John de Lancie's playing to glean something about his character.

   I knew him only slightly after he landed in Miami, well after his
   days in Philadelphia leading the Curtis Institute of Music and
   spreading his noble sound over audiences at the Academy of Music.
   Courtly and handsome, de Lancie had a formidable personal style that
   was sometimes quite stern, but when he smiled at you it was like a
   form of sunny approval shining from some higher place.

   "He had a lot of authority," says Mason Jones, the only remaining
   member of the original Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet and former
   Philadelphia Orchestra principal hornist.

   He could be intense, but with an air of formality.  "As long as I
   knew him, I never called him anything other than Mr. de Lancie,"
   said Richard Woodhams, a former de Lancie student who is now the
   Philadelphia Orchestra's deft principal oboist.

   De Lancie, who died on May 17 at the age of 80 at his home in Walnut
   Creek, Calif., defined the style of oboe playing favored in this
   country for the last half-century or more.  His philosophies are
   still heard nearly every night of the year in the playing of students
   in orchestras in New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia.

   John de Lancie was double-reed royalty, the last of a generation of
   cohesive woodwind players from the Philadelphia Orchestra that matched
   the group's famously velvety strings with equally nimble and suave
   woodwind playing.

   Immortality, at least of an artistic sort, is something de Lancie
   achieved to an unusual degree for an ensemble player.  Not only will
   his students practice what he preached, but a suggestion de Lancie
   made to Richard Strauss for a solo oboe work resulted in Strauss'
   greatest concerto for any instrument - an unusually spare, tuneful
   score that glows with quiet joy.

   And there are, of course, the recordings - hundreds of Philadelphia
   Orchestra albums, embedded with de Lancie's special sound, made during
   what may turn out to be classical's most productive era of recording.
   ...

   http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/magazine/daily/3396016.htm

Mary Esterheld