In Georgia, war tanks turn to culture

TBILISI, Georgia | When David Sakvarelidze heard Russian bombs falling on the outskirts of Tbilisi, he knew he had to do something.

When he saw Russian warplanes and tanks brush aside the Georgian military, he knew he had to help defend his country and his family.

After Russian soldiers halted a half-hour’s drive from Tbilisi, Mr. Sakvarelidze thought of rallying the world to protect his children, wife, friends and countrymen.

The 38-year-old director of the Tbilisi Opera and Ballet Theater knew he had to act, but did not know how.

“If they tell me to fight, I will fight,” Mr. Sakvarelidze said, sitting in the Acid Bar behind the theater house as American jazz played softly in the background.

Georgia’s five-day war with Russia in August proved the futility of fighting Moscow’s forces on the battlefield but opened a cultural war for sympathy being waged by combatants on both sides.

Mr. Sakvarelidze said he wants to make Tbilisi a jewel of the international arts community, and in doing so strengthen the West’s personal connections with his small country. He and other Georgian artists are trying to defend their country with arias, paintbrushes and clay creations.

“;Art is our weapon,” Mr. Sakvarelidze said. “We have nothing else here.”

Cultural warfare has a long history in the region.

During the Cold War, the Voice of America broadcast jazz behind the Iron Curtain. The Soviet Union possessed fearsome weapons systems but could not compete with U.S. popular culture.

“Jazz connected American and Soviet culture like a wire,” said George Yashvili, a sculptor whose career began when bushy-browed Leonid Brezhnev ran the Kremlin.

With the curtains drawn and volume down, Mr. Yashvili, now 52, listened to the jazz broadcasts, warbled by the KGB´s efforts to jam the radio frequency.

“Under the communist regime, jazz was forbidden because it was believed to be capitalistic music,” said Misha Giorgadze, a music promoter in Tbilisi.

Today it is difficult to walk around Tbilisi without hearing jazz. It is played in bars, cafes and stores - even in Gori, Josef Stalin´s hometown.

Mr. Giorgadze´s company, Eastern Promotions, organizes an annual Tbilisi Jazz Festival, which regularly draws top Western musicians such as Herbie Hancock, Joe Cocker and Maceo Parker.

The festival, which had to be postponed this year because of the war, brings people to Georgia who otherwise would have no connection to the country, he said.

“We live in a modern world that´s not so much about muscles anymore, but more about diplomacy and being part of a civilized, modern society,” he said in his office adorned with posters of past shows.

While jazz is widely popular in Tbilisi, there are few Georgian jazz artists because the domestic market is too small to support them. One potential star, Beka Gochitashvili, a 12-year-old prodigy, is living in New York and studying under jazz pianist Kenny Baron. Recently, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took time for a photo op with him.

Other art forms are also struggling to find support. Few of the country’s 4.5 million people have enough disposable income to spend on paintings and decorative sculptures.

Georgia´s artists sell their work abroad. They are also pursuing grants. The Clay Group, which consists of ceramic artists, recently received a $20,000 grant from the Soros Foundation to buy new kilns and other equipment.

After the August war, the Clay Group held an exhibition to raise money for victims of the fighting. Thirty-five artists, including several Europeans and even Russians, donated pieces to the show.

“Clay is our language, and we decided to say something,” said Nato Eristavi, one of the group´s founders.

In the middle of the show sat a large bomb made of unfired clay. Exhibition-goers poured water over the raw clay, which, cupful by cupful, broke down into wet lumps, which the attendees turned into animals, flowers and people. Miss Eristavi made a dove - symbolizing hope for a more peaceful world, she said.

“As an artist my country needs me more than as a soldier or politician,” Miss Eristavi said.

Art projects encourage freedom far better than military wares can. “Kalashnikovs, tanks, rockets, yes, you can win the battle with these, but you can´t win the war,” Mr. Yashvili said.

Domestic and foreign artists have turned their talents to help victims of the war. While many musicians canceled scheduled appearances in Tbilisi, Bryan Adams held a charity concert in the city in mid-September.

Georgia is not the only combatant to turn to cultural warfare. Not long after the fighting stopped in August, Russian conductor Valery Gergiev led a requiem concert in South Ossetia´s capital, Tskhinvali, for the breakaway region´s war dead.

A native Ossetian, Mr. Gergiev is the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and principal guest conductor of New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

Mr. Gergiev told the crowd he wanted to show the world what had happened in Tskhinvali, which he called a victim of Georgian aggression.

Before Tskhinvali’s burned-out parliament building, Mr. Gergiev led the orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony. Nearly 67 years earlier, the Leningrad Radio Orchestra played the same piece as German bombs fell on the city.

Next Mr. Gergiev and St. Petersburg’s Kirov-Mariinsky Theater Orchestra performed Dmitry Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, the “Leningrad Symphony.” Mr. Shostakovich wrote the piece during Nazi Germany’s 900-day siege of the city, now known as St. Petersburg.

Tbilisi had a rival requiem a month later.

Mr. Sakvarelidze organized a performance of Guiseppe Verdi´s Requiem Mass with the help of opera singer Paata Burchuladze. The internationally renowned Georgian´s basso voice has filled major opera houses from Milan´s Teatro alla Scala to New York´s Met.

The performance was held in the Tbilisi Sports Palace in front of 10,000 people. Inside, Georgian red-on-white five-cross flags hung motionless. Many concert-goers wore chokha, traditional Georgian outfits with khanjali, an ornamental sword.

On stage, Mr. Burchuladze was joined by soprano Olga Romanko, mezzo-soprano Luciana D’Intino, tenor Ramon Vargas and conductor Angel Martinez.

Few things made by man evoke the range of emotions as much as war and Verdi’s Requiem.

At times terrifying and sublime, the music echoed what the people of this region had experienced in August.

A middle-aged woman wiped tears from the face of her mother, who sat beside her in a wheelchair.

During the piece’s final movement, Libera Me, a girl holding a single candle, stood on stage. Mr. Burchuladze stood silently behind her. The audience rose, holding thousands of lighted candles in the darkened hall, as the music built into its terrifying and overwhelming climax, finally giving way to Ms. Romanko’s soprano voice pleading, “Libre me, Domine” (Deliver me, O Lord).