Sokoloff's Choice

When Nikolai Sokoloff conducts his Cleveland Orchestra in its annual Manhattan concert, he usually attracts attention by performing unusual music. In last week's concert Conductor Sokoloff seemed more than ever an apostle of the curious. Following Chabrier's Marche Joyenuse, he presented d'Indy's seldom-heard Jour d'Ete la Montagne, then three Manhattan premieres--First Airphonic Suite for RCA Theremin* and Orchestra by Russian Joseph Schillinger; Overture to a Don Quixote by Jean Rivier, 33-year-old Parisian; and New Year's Eve in New York by Werner Janssen, 30, Manhattan jazz pianist and composer. Critics paid scant attention to the first half of the program. The Chabrier was tame, the d'Indy lovely but pallid. The Clevelanders played well, but the last half agitated some critical pens .

The Rivier "left nothing behind it but regret that Paris had devoted itself to the pursuit of the American fox."--W. J. Henderson in the New York Sun.

The Janssen was "merely inconsequential."--Lawrence Gilman in the New York Herald Tribune.

Of the RCA Theremin, admittedly an uncannily clever invention, Olin Downes wrote in the New York Times: ''We do not like to think of a populace at the mercy of this fearfully magnified and potent tone that Professor Theremin has brought into the world. The radio machines are bad enough, but what will happen to the auditory nerves in a land where super-Theremin machines can hurl a jazz ditty through the atmosphere with such horribly magnified sonorities that they could deaden the sound of an automobile exhaust from 20 miles away?"

*A boxlike, ether-wave instrument invented and played upon (motion of the hands before the instrument affects the ether waves, regulates pitch, tone, volume) by Russian Leon Theremin (TIME, Sept. 30). His recent sale of his patent to the Radio Corp. of America accounts for the new joint name given the instrument.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.