Culture Missionaries

For the second year in a row, Britain played host to a troupe of Soviet culture missionaries. Last year's troupe stressed Soviet musicianship in romantic and contemporary works, and had a definitely highbrow pitch. Last week, in London and the provinces, the 1953 visitors were showing something for everybody.

Galya Izmailova, ballerina of the Uzbek Opera Theatre, turned up with a trio of squat-dancers. Dressed in traditional Uzbek pantaloons, she wriggled and shook various parts of her body separately and in unison with dramatic overtones ranging from the flirtatious to the provocative. Sergei Obraztsov, whose official title is Puppet Master of the Central Puppet

Theatre, Moscow, treated his audience to

1) a ten-minute harangue about the advantages of life in the Soviet Union, and

2) a first-class performance of glove-puppet pantomime. Avner Barayev, a virtuoso with the tambourine-like doira, gave a spirited demonstration, beating a pair of them against his knees and spinning them on his fingertips, and kept his rhythms tapping for ten minutes at a time.

For more severe tastes, the Soviets also sent a young violinist named Igor Oistrakh. He played Beethoven's Violin Concerto with the London Philharmonic, and the critics approved to a man. The Times was relatively reserved, praising his "artistic integrity and surety of execution." The Daily Express' Cecil Smith, usually a hard man to please, went overboard: "Not since the piano playing of the 23-year-old Horowitz burst on Western ears 25 years ago has Russia given us so staggeringly gifted a young musician."

The quality of his playing raised a number of eager questions about young

Igor Oistrakh, but the Russians were too busy for interviews. The main facts about Igor: he is the son of famed Soviet Violinist David Oistrakh (TIME, July 9, 1951), and he is 22.

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