 Both "Antar" and "Scheherazade" use a robust "Russian" theme to portray the male protagonists (the title character in "Antar"; the sultan in "Scheherazade") and a more sinuous "Eastern" theme for the female ones (the peri Gul-Nazar in "Antar" and the title character in "Scheherazade").Where Rimsky-Korsakov changed between these two sets of works was in orchestration.While his pieces were always celebrated for their imaginative use of instrumental forces, the sparser textures of "Sadko" and "Antar" pale compared to the luxuriance of the more popular works of the 1880s.