Salt at Stockbridge

For the past six years the Boston Symphony's Berkshire Festival, near Stockbridge, Mass.,has provided an elegant musical salt lick amid the favorite summer grazing grounds of Boston's contented Brahmins. Spooned delicately out by the great Dr. Serge Koussevitzky and his flawless orchestra, the Festival's six annual programs have so far been noted more for purity than for pungency. But last week the Berkshire Festival produced an unusually big and tangy lump of salt. A brown, bosomy, 28-year-old Negro soprano named Dorothy Maynor, who went to Stockbridge to hear the music, ended up by making music for Stockbridge's awed music makers.

Invited to the Festival by friends, soft-spoken Dorothy Maynor wangled a chance to sing for Koussevitzky. When her big, velvety voice swung out in a brace of difficult Lieder, ceremonious Koussevitzky threw up his hands, cried: "A native Flagstad!" Next day, at a private picnic given by Koussevitzky to the members of the orchestra and a few hand-picked critics and musicians, Soprano Maynor, perfectly poised, warbled faultless coloratura, crooned deep Lieder, went to town on a Wagnerian Ho-yo-to-ho. The gilt-edged professional audience marveled at her versatility and easy form, found her rich voice one of the finest in a generation.

Asked how she came by her poise and cultivated musical taste (her only previous public appearances had been as a soloist with the Negro Hampton Institute Choir), Soprano Maynor modestly gave all the credit to her teachers. When she had heard the last concert of the Festival, Dorothy Maynor thanked her hostess for a nice time, took the next train for Manhattan, where she lives with her mother (a Methodist minister's widow) in a small upper-West Side apartment. When she got home she started practicing for her first public recital, at Town Hall in November. Said she: "My week has been so exciting I can't believe it's true."

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