Not by the Pound

Most listeners thought they knew the singing--the pillow-soft pianissimos, the warm and velvety power even at full voice--even though at first some did not recognize the singer. In five months, tiny (4 ft. 8 1/2 in.), once-tubby (201 lbs.) Dorothy Maynor had lost 72 pounds by rigorous dieting, slimmed down to a more curvaceous 129. But last week, as the first guest soloist on the NBC Symphony's new U.S. Steel-sponsored Summer Concert series, the little Negro soprano proved that great singing does not necessarily come by the pound.

In rehearsal, she puzzled Guest Conductor Fritz Reiner with her embellishments in the spiritual she was going to sing; she could not mark the places in the score for him so he could be sure to keep the NBC Symphony in step: "I'm sorry, I just have to do it as the spirit moves me." In the broadcast last week, the spirit was moving little Soprano Maynor--but with a faultless taste and timing that kept Conductor Reiner and her listeners moving right with her.

In the ten years since her debut at the Berkshire Festival, when Serge Koussevitzky had called her "a native Flagstad," Norfolk-born Dorothy Maynor has gone a long way. She has sung with most of the great U.S. orchestras, crisscrossed the U.S. and South America with concert tours. However, like her famed contralto counterpart, Marian Anderson, she has not yet been invited to sing at the Metropolitan Opera.

At 38, she is a friendly little woman, brimming with vitality. She had to give up tennis while she was reducing. But when she is not on tour, she still roller-skates daily in Manhattan's Central Park. Even while she is busy preparing her part of the program for the Goethe Bicentennial celebration at Aspen, Colo, next month, she "keeps three kitchens going"--one at her sunlit 16th floor studio in the "heaven of Carnegie Hall," one in the nine-room house she runs as the wife of Dr. Shelby Rooks, Presbyterian minister, and one on their York River, Virginia farm, which, she says, "is just a place to isolate yourself --a few boats on the river, a few bunnies on the lawn."

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