Maynor's Year

Manhattan's Town Hall, No. 2 fane of music for the U. S. faithful*, was well packed one night last week. It had been sold out for four days--good news in a season that had not begun too well for concert managers. Cause of the turnout was a brown, dignified, warm-smiling woman, in a billowy, pumpkin-colored gown which failed to add much to her melony 4 ft. 10 in. Negro Soprano Dorothy Maynor, just past her 30th birthday, had begun her second concert season.

Year ago, hailed by Boston's patrician Conductor Serge Koussevitzky, she made her Town Hall debut, unleashed a voice for which everyone predicted a future. Last week, long before she got to the inevitable Negro spirituals, Soprano Maynor showed that her future had begun. Her voice had rounded at the top, where it needed to; her knowledge of what she was about had deepened. Tenderly she sang Schumann's Du bist wie eine Blume, chicly she trilled a trifle of Bizet.

Soprano Maynor, whose patroness (Miss Mary Hayden of Boston) had to buy her debut gown last year, is now in the bank-account class. She has moved from Manhattan's Harlem to musical West 57th Street. Besides singing with the four major symphony orchestras (New York Philharmonic, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago), she made a triumphant concert return to Hampton Institute, in whose choir her voice began. This season Dorothy Maynor has engagements in 27 States, is making two big cross-country tours. Boxofficially she is not yet the peer of big-voiced Contralto Marian Anderson, who sells out Carnegie Hall. But Dorothy Maynor is just hitting her stride.

* No. 1: Carnegie Hall, bigger and costlier to hire.

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