Akkadians

Serge Koussevitzky, brilliant, provocative conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra startled conservative ears last week when he gave the mad, barbaric incantation of Prokofiev's "Sept, Us sont sept"* its first and its second performance in Manhattan. For, having played the feverish chant in which the shattering tenor voice of the priest screams in frenzy to the seven horrible demons of Akkadian legend against a background of a surging, fanatical chorus as the third number on his program, he repeated it as the fifth for the better understanding of the audience.

The Seven are the authors of all human woe. They are in the sky and the abyss; they rise in the west, they loom in the east; their immensity fills heaven and earth; they grind men as men grind grain.

Last week, Conductor Koussevitzky again startled. He accepted for performance next month by his orchestra, "Flivver 10,000,000," subtitled "A Joyous Epic." The opening prologue of this ultramodern symphonic cycle by Frederic S. Converse is "Dawn in Detroit." Of the life of a Ford, Composer Converse then writes, of its building, its romance by the roadside, its collisions, rattlings, wheezings.

* Invocation for tenor, chorus and or chestra.