Music: Prokofiev Hailed

Applause such as is rarely heard burst out in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall last week. The occasion was a Boston Symphony concert. The heroes: Russian Conductor Sergei Koussevitzky and Russian Composer Sergei Prokofiev who appeared also as pianist. No stranger in U. S. music halls is Composer Prokofiev. He used to be railed at as the enfant terrible among moderns, a name belied by his pleasant. Pucklike presence. But since others have outdone him in the making of queer, dissonant patterns, the public has found him less disturbing, more to be accepted. Prokofiev too has changed in the past ten years. Now 38, leading an unheckled life in Manhattan, he writes more simply and with greater deference to melody. Yet it was music done in his first, scorned manner which caused the furor last week—his Scythia Suite, fearfully exhilarating with its barbaric dances, its wailings, its concluding salute to the sun; then his Second Piano Concerto, originally composed in 1913 but lost when the Soviet Government confiscated all Prokofiev property in Leningrad and only recently rewritten from sketches.