Music: From a Boston Balcony

Victor, the Russian valet, stepped back and proudly regarded his handiwork: Sergei Koussevitzky, the best-dressed man in Boston, imposing in cutaway and flowing black cravat. On Symphony Hall stage the players tuned to the oboe’s A, while Brahmins found their places. All stood when Koussevitzky entered, made his calm & studied bow. When the first piece was over he did an unaccustomed thing. He grinned. To open the Boston Symphony’s 54th season Koussevitzky had chosen a rich, compact passacaglia which he had written himself. Bostonians had been curious. Koussevitzky, they knew, was the world’s greatest bull-fiddler. He could write sympathetically for the big bass, as Kreisler has written for the violin. For the Symphony’s 50th anniversary celebration he contributed an overture. But Boston was apathetic to a composer who at that time preferred to remain anonymous. When last week’s audience approved the passacaglia, prouder than Victor the valet was a plump motherly woman who by choice sits in the balcony. She had known Koussevitzky when he wore an ill-fitting Prince Albert, a shaggy mustache, high wing collars. She had stepped out of her class and married him, given him money to form an orchestra, tour the provinces and down the Volga. Exiled from Russia she helped finance him in Western Europe, became his shrewd self-effacing partner in a music-publishing concern which has sponsored the works of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff. Natalya Koussevitzky is rightfully proud of her husband’s U. S. achievements. He has polished Boston’s orchestra so that it again rivals New York’s and Philadelphia’s. He has given peerless performances of Ravel and Debussy, established himself as the greatest of U. S. program makers. Proud Bostonians have accepted him to the extent of making him a member of the Somerset Club, a Beacon Hill institution so exclusive that little Brahmins are usually registered for it immediately after birth.

Natalya Koussevitzky, obscure in her balcony seat, had her own feast-day coming. Two days after the Symphony opening came her 60th birthday. Koussevitzky, patterning himself after Wagner, had Symphony men go to their Brookline home, play an early-morning serenade to his good wife.