Word: scythian
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Prokofiev: Symphony No. 4 (the Philadelphia Orchestra, under Eugene Ormandy; Columbia). A rare LP recording of one of the early Prokofiev symphonies all but forgotten in Western concert halls. The composer here is less acerbic, more expansive than in the Scythian Suite or Love for Three Oranges, and the score is curiously uneven, mingling occasional film-score banalities with splendid rhythmic inventions...
...museum has no Russian paintings, which are housed in other Leningrad museums. But three of its six departments display only Russian objects ranging from Stone-Age relics to 20th century silverware. Under heavy guard in a basement vault is the Hermitage's prize display: a dazzling collection of Scythian and ancient Greek gold objects that may well be the finest in the world...
...saga of the Scythian shepherd who vaultingly subdued half of Asia and Africa is too brutally simple for true drama. With its host of bloody conquests and dearth of inner conflict, with its portrayal of one who toppled realms like tenpins, it scarcely provides even variations on a single theme. As Tamburlaine sweeps on, nothing interrupts his conquests and cruelties but his Marlovian sense of physical beauty and his feeling for Zenocrate, the captive princess whom he loved and lost...
MUSEUM WITHOUT WALLS explores Malraux's thesis that art reproductions present mankind for the first time with a real view of the whole world's art. In reproductions, he writes, "miniatures, frescoes, stained glass, tapestries, Scythian plaques, pictures, Greek vase paintings, 'details' and even statuary . . . have lost their properties as objects; but . . . gained something: the utmost significance as to style that they can possibly acquire...
Sergei Prokofiev was an established musical revolutionary of 26 when the Bolsheviks spread flame and famine across Russia in 1917. He had outjangled Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in his pagan Scythian Suite, startled St. Petersburg's musical society with the thudding energy of his piano pieces. When he wanted to-as he showed in his Classical Symphony -he could write with sweet simplicity. But he seldom cared to prove it. "I believe," he wrote, "that it is a mistake to favor musical simplification...