“The great thing about Riga is that, even when things don’t quite work, they’re very seldom boring.”

OPERA NATION Opera critic Shirley Apthorp explains why she keeps coming back again and again for more of the celebrated Latvian National Opera.

It’s not so easy to get from Berlin to Riga. The first time I came was on a Russian cargo ship from Travemünde. It took 48 hours, which were among the most dull and productive of my life. There was nothing at all to do on board, unless you count the video screen in the bar, where they showed—appropriately enough—Titanic, dubbed in Russian. I locked myself into my cabin and wrote.
       Coming back was tricky too. At 5:30 one morning, dreadfully hung over, I climbed aboard a train, not realizing that there was no restaurant car and no chance of getting anything to eat or drink. 14 hours later, I arrived in Warsaw, more thirsty than I have ever been in my life before.
       Of course, you can fly, though it’s marginally more expensive than a trip to New York. Or there’s the bus, if you don’t mind backache and insomnia.
So why bother? There are an awful lot of other places that you can get to from Berlin with considerably less effort. Even if, like me, your main motivation for travel is opera.
       But the Latvian National Opera has an allure I can’t resist, and I’ve come back to the Riga Opera Festival every year since that first trip, in 1998.
       There are superficially obvious reasons for doing so. The house itself, definitely one of Europe’s most beautiful, so pleasingly ornate and invitingly cozy. It is better than good. The exterior calls to mind Moscow’s Bolshoi. Inside it is sheer delight. A horseshoe, widening towards the proscenium, seating just a thousand, it is at once intimate and grand. Lavish gold leaf ornamentation set off against peppermint green walls and red plush drapery complements an acoustic to rival the very best.
       There’s also the orchestra, with its mellow, clear sound, so patently committed to excellence. And there are the long, light nights, the clear, sharp air, the abundance of good restaurants. The peripherals are also nice.
       But that’s not the real fascination. I’m hooked on the Latvian National Opera because of its quixotic determination, its crazy addiction to risk, its sense of the fact that there is an artistic utopia out there to which it’s worth aspiring.
       If I think about it, there’s not one opera production I’ve seen in Riga which I’d call an unqualified success. The singing is on average good, and sometimes exceptional; the conducting is generally fine, and sometimes genuinely enlightened; the visual images are usually strong, and sometimes hauntingly beautiful. But things often fail to hang together on a dramaturgical level, something of an occupational hazard if you’ve a penchant for working with young directors. 
       That said, as an opera critic, I’m paid to be dissatisfied with most of the opera I see, and I certainly don’t have to go all the way to Riga to see unsatisfactory opera. I’ve spent more nights in opera houses being bored rigid than most people have had Chinese takeout dinners, but the great thing about Riga is that, even when things don’t quite work, they’re very seldom boring.

Now going on his first decade at the helm of the Latvian National Opera, Intendant Andrejs Zagars has managed to put a distinctive stamp on the house and its work. In his determination to move away from the moth-eaten shabbiness of traditional Eastern European opera production, Zagars has hired people who, whatever else you might think of them, are certainly not going to present viewers with anything conservative. Zagars has a vision of an operatic world which is thrilling, contemporary, gorgeous and intellectually challenging. If he were really able to explain how this should be done, he would be the most wanted man on the Continent. As it is, he is rumored to be consistently unhappy with the products of his own company. And with reason; some of what ends up on stage makes pretty confused viewing. But just about all of it seems to share the common goal of a search for a new kind of opera, something better, more imaginative, funnier, more disturbing, more vital than what we’ve seen until now. The greater the risks you take, the higher your chances of failure; and a bold failure makes far more entertaining viewing than a tame success. If even half of Western Europe’s opera houses dared to be so visionary, we opera critics would spend a lot less of our time getting bored.
       Riga’s isolation is glaringly apparent in much of its opera house’s work. Who else would put an interval in Salome? There are things that the Latvian National Opera does simply because nobody there realizes that these things aren’t done. It’s one of the house’s greatest assets, this freedom from stifling preconception. Whether you think they work or not, the operas you’ll see in Riga won’t look anything like the operas you’ll see anywhere else. Of course, there are exceptions—co-productions with foreign partners—but so far they haven’t dented the Latvian National Opera’s originality.
       And that’s what keeps me coming back. There’s no particular reason for this tiny opera house in this small capital of this very small country to believe that it can make a serious contribution to one of the greatest art forms of our time. But it does. One day—just perhaps—its belief will prove correct. I hope I’m there when that happens. 


For the Latvian National Opera schedule, including for more about the celebrated summer opera festival in Riga, see http://www.lmuza.lv/opera/.

The above article was republished recently in CITY PAPER with the kind permission of Shirley Apthorp. (Photos courtesy of the Latvian National Opera.)

Also from the CITY PAPER archives, see Opera Diplomacy.