On Thursday, documents, mementos, furniture and other items from the Baltimore Opera Company will be sold to the highest bidders in the first of three auctions slated this month. It's the humiliating finale for the city's operatic flagship, which sought to reorganize under bankruptcy laws in December and shifted to a liquidation in March.
Still, opera performances won't vanish from the city.
On June 2, operatic voices will be heard again in the Lyric when the theater presents Washington National Opera in a concert version - no sets, costumes, lighting - of Puccini's Turandot. No word yet on whether WNO will return next season; the reaction to the June performance will help determine that.
Whatever WNO does, the Baltimore Opera Theater, launched by seasoned impresario Giorgio Lalov, plans to make its debut next season with two staged productions at the Hippodrome and two operas in concert form at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. The repertoire, at last check, will include Rossini's The Barber of Seville, Verdi's Rigoletto and Puccini's La Boheme.
Baltimore Concert Opera, which bowed two months ago at the Engineers Club, will open next season there with Gounod's Faust, unstaged and accompanied by piano. General director Brendan Cooke is contemplating bigger projects after that.
John Bowen's Opera Vivente will present its 12th season of fully staged works at Emmanuel Episcopal Church - Mozart's The Magic Flute, Rossini's Cinderella, Debussy's Pelleas and Mellisande.
At the Theatre Project, Tim Nelson's American Opera Theater plans a new work fashioned out of Kurt Weill compositions and a reprise of the company's staging of Le Cabaret de Carmen. A dramatization of Handel's oratorio Jephtha with the Handel Choir of Baltimore is on the schedule, too.
As usual, there will also be various staged productions by the Peabody Opera Theatre, featuring conservatory students, so Baltimore will remain busy operatically, even without the big company that held on for nearly six decades before collapsing.
But this is a good time to try putting things into perspective.
The lamented Baltimore Opera was, for want of a better term, a grand opera company, producing works on a sizable scale. With its budget of roughly $6 million, it was nationally recognized as a major company. The overall quality of the singers, conductors and directors was on a high level, too.
