Prokofieff s New Line

In Chicago's Orchestra Hall one night last week, while chunky Conductor Hans Lange stood on the podium and the Chicago Symphony sat ready, a tall, blond man lumbered in.

looking ''engagingly like Henry of the cartoons" to Critic Claudia Cassidy of the Journal of Commerce. Sergei Prckofieff seated himself at a piano, neatly and precisely played with the orchestra his own Concerto No. 1. No stranger to Chicago was this 45-year-old Russian. There in 1921 both the caustic Concerto and Prokofieff's opera The Love for Three Oranges received the:r first performances. In Chicago last week on his seventh U. S.

visit, carrying a miniature chess set in his pocket as usual, Prokofieff had ready a new work embodying what he said was a new melodic line, full of "new curves" because he thinks that modern music must be melodic yet not reactionary. The work was a suite from a ballet, Romeo & Juliet, which Prokofieff conducted with precise beat and knees that wobbled curiously but in accurate rhythm. The audience, cordial but not unrestrained, found Romeo & Juliet a sly, elusive projection of its subject, more lyric than Prokofieff's early works have been credited with being, but less so than the composer's talk of curves had suggested. This week Prokofieff conducts the St. Louis Symphony. After a visit to Boston for whose Symphony he composed Symphony No. 4, he will sail for France and the U.

S. S. R. In the past Composer Prokofieff has not objected to statements that he was an exile, his property having been confiscated after he fled the Revolution. At last week's Chicago concert, program notes had it that he left Russia with the Soviet Government's per- mission "in consequence of the general confusion." In any case, Russian Prokofieff now maintains an apartment in Moscow, where his sons Sviatoslav, 12, and Eleg, 7, are being brought up. Thither last week he had a new Ford shipped.

Next March the Moscow Philharmonic will give the world premiere of Prokofieff's second suite based on Romeo & Juliet. He also has been commissioned, in connection with the centenary of the death of Poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), to do special music for a cinema and two plays, in all three of which his performance will perforce be compared with those of Russians who have made use of the same Pushkin works: Boris Godunov (Moussorgsky), Pique-Dame and Eugene Oniegin (Tchaikovsky).

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