mans sviests

NYT
17.7.06 12:06
huge wheels of the sweetish, dark rye bread called laci; traditional dairy products like cannabis butter and the caraway cheese that’s eaten on Midsummer Eve.

Mr. Zagars, who stands about six and a half feet tall, with the piercing gaze and square jaw of a movie star and the mien of a contented cat, brings to his job a blend of artistic and business backgrounds.

In Riga, Creating an Identity Through the Arts

By ANNE MIDGETTE
IT’S 2 a.m. in Riga, and the cobbled streets of the Old Town are crowded. The pelmeni shop, where you can fill up on stuffed noodles (the ex-Soviet world’s answer to ravioli) for a dollar or two, is doing a brisk business. A line of teenagers, good-humored and mildly raucous, snakes out the door of Pulkvedim Neviens Neraksta (No One Writes to the Colonel), the reigning alt-music temple. And windows on every street frame views of people dancing to loud, loud music: in a restaurant, booked for a private party; in a nightclub that has reserved a window spot for its strippers’ pole; and, most incongruously, in a tearoom, where exuberant bodies have carved out a dance floor amid the little round tables and echoes of gently clinking cups.

Rules? What rules? Riga, cultured, energetic and young, is making them up as it goes along. Latvia is the poorest country in the European Union, but high-end Riga, its capital, is the most cosmopolitan city in the Baltics, with upscale shops, new museums, modern hotels and restaurants and only traces of what Latvia now calls the Soviet occupation (a term that’s created a certain chilliness in Latvian-Russian relations).

Entrepreneurs here are learning that new ideas can make money. Why, for example, shouldn’t a restaurant turn into a disco at night? Why should the city’s chefs remain constrained by fish, dark rye bread and boiled peas with bacon — traditional Latvian fare — when there are so many new “fusion” ingredients: litchi nuts and jalapeños, hoisin sauce and dim sum?

And why, say the city’s fathers and mothers (women play a huge role in this young society), should Riga’s cultural institutions remain bound by the past? Riga’s classical concert life, which was abruptly cut adrift from the Soviet system, is now in flux, about to spawn yet another orchestra; Riga’s curators are planning the construction of a contemporary art museum; and Riga’s opera company is widely acknowledged as one of the best in the former East Bloc.

The opera house is a fine metaphor for the new Riga: its cultivated facade masks an underlying exuberance. Pale and neo-Classical, it stands in the strip of parkland that divides the two halves of the city: the old-world Old Town and the newer section that grew up outside the walls of the old fortress in the 19th century and is now known, somewhat confusingly to visitors, as the Center.

The theater has been restored to its 1863 splendor, with gleaming wood floors, gilt trim and reliefs in hand-pressed plaster; modern additions have expanded rehearsal space and offices. The whole thing has been run for the last 10 years by a charismatic and unconventional general director named Andrejs Zagars, who presents cutting-edge young directors and singers from beyond Latvia’s borders. Mr. Zagars, who stands about six and a half feet tall, with the piercing gaze and square jaw of a movie star and the mien of a contented cat, brings to his job a blend of artistic and business backgrounds. In the 1980’s and early 90’s, he was a successful actor; after the breakup of the Soviet Union, he opened and operated a string of restaurants.

“I want to poison the Latvians with opera,” he says, speaking in his office before the company’s recent premiere of “Das Rheingold.” “I want to create an addiction.”

He has certainly created a lot of buzz, not least with this new production. Riga’s opera company has taken on Richard Wagner’s “Ring” cycle for the first time in more than 100 years, giving each of the operas to a different stage director and presenting one a year through 2009, in co-production with the Bergen International Festival in Norway. “Das Rheingold” is directed by a pleasantly controversial German-based wunderkind named Stefan Herheim: in his vision, the gods appear as German cultural icons like Nietzsche and Mozart and Bismarck; Wotan and Alberich are Richard Wagner; and the Rheingold and Valhalla are Wagner’s real-life Grail, the opera house in Bayreuth.

Although Wagner himself lived in Riga for two years, it’s open to question how many of Riga’s citizens, long deprived of the composer’s music, got all of Mr. Herheim’s clever German references, but productions like these, showcased in the annual opera festival in June, have certainly gotten their interest: ticket sales have soared from 67 percent to 85 percent, Mr. Zagars said. Mr. Zagars, continuing in the new Latvian tradition of making up one’s own rules, has even started directing opera himself. This season will see a new “Traviata.”

Culture is anything but tangential in a country seeking to create an identity. Latvia has been aware of this since the start of its first, short-lived spate of independence in 1919: it immediately created a system of state museums and an Academy of Fine Arts to foster the Latvian school of painting. (Yes, there is a Latvian school of painting. In the State Museum of Art, slightly surreal because the styles are familiar but all of the artists are Latvian, you can see striking works by Jazeps Grosvalds, who helped create the Riga Artists Group before his death at 29 in 1920, or Aleksandra Belcova, who blended the vocabularies of Cubism and Russian Constructivism in her portraits.)

Latvia got to be a country for only a couple of decades before the Soviet Union took over; but with freedom in 1991 came a new sense of artistic self-definition. The Arsenal, a hip exhibition space in the Old Town that’s part of the state museum network, recently mounted the first-ever retrospective of Latvian art after World War II. A permanent home for this collection is a priority of the culture minister, Helena Demakova.

Ms. Demakova’s plans also include the construction of the long-planned National Library, designed by the Latvian expatriate star architect Gunnar Birkerts, and a concert hall to replace the shabby Great Guild Hall, where the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra performs in an auditorium accessible only via several flights of chipped terrazzo stairs. These new edifices — assuming Ms. Demakova manages to secure the funds to build them before the anticipated shake-up of national elections this fall — will give tangible form to the question of just how Latvian culture is to be integrated into Riga’s conglomerate, polymorphous landscape. On the one hand, the city seeks to establish itself in terms of the European mainstream. But on the other, Riga, an ancient capital (it celebrated its 800th birthday in 2001) in a young country, has a layered profile, both architecturally and culturally, and its quirkiness is part of its charm.

Riga’s cityscape spans centuries, from the crooked Dutch Renaissance houses along Maza Pils Iela in the Old Town to the Soviet-era monuments — the concrete slab of the Reval Hotel Latvija or the turreted Academy of Sciences, unaffectionately dubbed “Stalin’s birthday cake” — of the Center. Among its distinctive features are the low wooden 19th-century buildings that incongruously dot the modern Center, relics of the first settlements outside the stone fortress walls; and the amazing Jugendstil facades in the residential streets of the Center, heavy with curlicues and sphinxes, rampant lions and human faces two stories high, as if the architect had channeled some early European antecedent of Walt Disney. (The architects included Mikhail Eisenstein, whose son Sergei directed “Battleship Potemkin.”)

Then there are the wooden villas of Jurmala, the seaside resort half an hour from Riga: dark weathered gingerbread buildings tucked among birch and pine woods just over a rise from the flat pale sands of the beaches along the Gulf of Riga. This was a beloved vacation spot of Soviet functionaries, who built a broad highway from Riga’s airport that was dubbed “Ten Minutes of America” for its putative resemblance to American Interstates.

Yet perhaps the best architectural allegory of Riga’s Soviet period is in the heart of Old Town, in Town Hall Square, where the graceful, gold-tipped Dutch Renaissance facade of the reconstructed guild building called the House of Blackheads contrasts dramatically with the black, blocky edifice that lies like a crushing footprint across one end of the square. This Soviet-era building today houses the Occupation Museum, chronicling life under the Soviets (and, briefly, the Germans) from 1940 to 1991.

Opera, painting, classical music: these are all ways to reestablish a national identity. But there’s another, folksier side to Latvian culture. By day, the streets of Riga’s Old Town are crowded not with clubgoers but with the stalls of countrywomen selling traditional crafts: amber, linen, knitwear, beeswax products. More flavors of Latvia are offered at the vast Central Market, housed in a set of former Zeppelin hangars near the train station: smoked fish thrust into a bucket like dried flowers; huge wheels of the sweetish, dark rye bread called laci; traditional dairy products like cannabis butter and the caraway cheese that’s eaten on Midsummer Eve.

Midsummer, or Jani, is a huge celebration that empties out Riga as everyone goes to the country to join in song and much Latvian beer. Worried that such traditions might fade in a consumer-oriented society, the Latvian government recently instituted free workshops to teach or remind people how the festival is celebrated.

So what, in the new Latvia, should take priority: the All-Latvian Song and Dance Festival, a huge event drawing thousands of Latvian singers from around the world every five years (the next is in 2008), or the furtherance of a struggling classical music scene? Ms. Demakova, the culture minister, is bent on establishing a new chamber orchestra, but some Latvian musicians question whether there are enough qualified players, in a country of 2.2 million, to support it. The lure of higher salaries draws the best musicians abroad; and the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra already employs a full complement of players, for a season of only a few concerts a year.

The answer will lie in the hands of whoever has the vision and energy to come up with a new set of rules. At the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, the latest candidate is a clarinet player named Ints Dalderis, formerly the orchestra manager of the opera orchestra, who was appointed to the symphony to achieve there the kind of results Mr. Zagars has gotten at the opera. It’s a tall order — or a stimulating challenge for a young Latvian helping to guide his country’s new direction.

“The exciting thing about working here,” Mr. Dalderis said, “is that things can change so fast. If I went to play in a German orchestra, everything would be fixed for three years; there would be no surprises. Here, I feel I can really make a difference.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

GETTING THERE

Flights to Riga from New York involve changing in Europe. Continental out of Newark with a transfer in Brussels starts at about $1,000 in early August, for example. Ryanair advertises flights for $16 from Stansted, serving London, starting in September.

ACCOMMODATION

Riga’s top-of-the-line boutique hotel is the Hotel Bergs (83/85 Elizabetes Iela, in Berga Bazars, 371-777-0900, www.hotelbergs.lv, $200 to $375), designed by a leading Latvian architect. In the Old Town, the Konventa Seta (9/11 Kaleju Iela, 371-708-7501, www.konventa.lv, $115 to $170) is a comfortably renovated medieval convent. Just opened this spring is the Europa Royale Riga (Krisjana Barona 12, 371-707-9444; www.hoteleuropa.lv, $220 to $1,280), in a sumptuous mansion once owned by the Latvian publishing magnate Anton Benjamin.

DINING

At Vincent’s (19 Elizabetes Iela, 371-733-2634) in the Center, the cuisine of Martins Ritins, and the prices, are very much on a Paris/New York scale: around 30 lats — roughly $54 at 0.56 lats to the dollar — a person for dinner. The focus is on organically grown local produce. The Lido chain serves tasty traditional meals, buffet-style, at reasonable prices (around 5 lats for dinner) in comfortable settings: try Alus Seta, in the Old Town (6 Tirgonu Iela, 371 722-2431), or Dzinavas (76 Dzirnavu Iela, 371-728-6204) in the Center.

NIGHT LIFE

Rigans kick off their evening at the Skyline Bar atop the Reval Hotel Latvija (55 Elizabetes Iela, 371-777-2345), where there are panoramic views of the night-spangled city. For real Latvian music, the hip and huge Cetri Balti Krekli (Four White Shirts) (12 Vecpilsetas Iela, 371-721-3885) is the place to go. Popular with the alternative crowd is Pulkvedim Neviens Neraksta (No One Writes to the Colonel) (26/28 Peldu Iela, 371-721-3886).

CULTURE

You can book tickets for the Latvian National Opera at www.music.lv/opera. There are performances the first two weeks of August; the season proper begins in mid-September and runs through the two-week opera festival in June. Information for other ensembles may be found at Music in Latvia (www.music.lv/en) and the Latvian Music Information Center (www.lmic.lv). Notable art galleries include Rigas Galerija (20 Aspazijas Bulevardi, 371-722-5887, www.riga-gallery.com); Bastejs (12 Bastejas Bulevardi, 371-722-5050); Maksla XO (8 Skarnu Iela, in an underground space in the Konventa Seta complex, 371-948-2098); and Noass (AB Dambis, moored to a bank of the Daugava; 371-770-3240, www.noass.lv).

http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/travel/16riga.html