Opera

OPERA IS FUN, and funny. It's bright and interesting, more interesting than straight theater. It doesn't have to be hard to understand, or like.You don't think so?Just ask Robert Kennedy, a music professor and head of the opera workshop at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.He says opera has gotten a bad rap. And he'd like to change that.Where is he starting? In kindergarten.That's how young some of the audiences for UMBC's opera workshop productions are. And they aren't put off by opera.

CHRIS MERRITT, Rossini tenor extraordinaire, will try to help the financially troubled Baltimore Opera Company cut its deficit problems by singing at its big $200-a-ticket fund-raiser, the Opera Ball, Saturday, Nov. 3, at Stouffer's Harborplace Hotel.Baltimorean Merritt will sing the acrobatic aria, "Pour mon ami" ("For my soul"), from Donizetti's "The Daughter of the Regiment," said Michael Harrison, the opera's general director. The aria has nine high "C's" and is considered one of the toughest to master, something like a trapeze artist's triple flip and then some.

The news stung. An old friend had died, and I never said goodbye. I assumed she'd always be there for me. But the Baltimore Opera is gone - yet another casualty of the economic morass. I can wag a finger at corporate sponsors and major donors. But my laissez-faire attitude also contributed to the final curtain. I should have gone to more performances. I could have bought season tickets. Had I known that the illness was terminal, I would have been more attentive. Too often, perhaps, I favored Washington or New York for their grander productions.

IN HIS review of the Baltimore Opera Company's presentation of Wagner's "Tannhauser" at the Lyric, J.D. Considine made a reference to the opera's internal and emotional depth in what he described as basically a morality play. But while describing the opera's tale of faith and redemption and lauding the majesty of its music, he could just as well have been describing an earlier opera called "Robert le Diable," by Giacomo Meyerbeer, once a towering figure in the world of opera. What brought that association to mind was a recent performance I attended of the Meyerbeer opera at the state opera house in Berlin, where it received a standing ovation for 10 minutes.

Baltimore opera fans can catch two 20th century works and nibble on goodies from seven others soon on three local college campuses. It may not be big time opera, but it'll be easier getting tickets than at the mainstream operas in Washington and Philadelphia, opening their seasons Saturday and Monday.Shows at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and Towson State University open the same night, Nov. 9, but second performances are scheduled on different days.The productions are as follows:* UMBC: Menotti's "The Old Maid and the Thief" (1939)

The Baltimore Opera Company, faced with an operating loss of $476,000 and teetering on bankruptcy after the 1989-90 season, has ended its 1990-91 season in the black, with an operating surplus of $41,000, the opera said.The surplus in the yet-to-be audited statement is beyond the company's $1 million raised in pledges and cash in the 18-month "Save the Opera" campaign. Half of those funds have already come in with the other half expected by December, the general director, Michael Harrison, said yesterday.

THE WOODLANDS, Texas -- In the 123 years since Georges Bizet's masterpiece had its premiere at the Opera-Comique in Paris, "Carmen" was never like this.The Houston Grand Opera is putting on a $1.3 million one-time-only outdoor production that employs techniques straight from the world of rock, including huge video backdrops that will show live close-ups of the action on stage as well as slidelike still projections."This is MTV opera," said David Gottlieb, president and chairman of the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, the suburban theater where the performance is set for tonight.

PICTURE THIS: Your life has just gone down the drain. So you swallow a lethal dose of poison. Just as your nervous system begins to fail, you sing a moving and beautiful song. Crazy? Not at all - just another summer night at the opera. As an opera fan, I'm accustomed to hearing, "How can you like opera?" Friends complain that opera is unrealistic: "Who sings when they are dying?" They imagine, as I once did, that opera is for the old or the rich. It's true that opera isn't for everyone.

Peel away the surfaces of Mozart's peerless comic opera The Marriage of Figaro and you can find some dark things going on. Poor Figaro learns that he was born out-of-wedlock. And his fiancee, Susanna, has to keep fighting off the pursuits of a philandering aristocrat who thinks someone passed an Offence to Marriage Act that entitles him to bed any bride before the groom. If you go Peabody Opera Theatre performs The Marriage of Figaro at 7:30 tonight and 3 p.m. tomorrow at Peabody Institute, 17 E. Mount Vernon Place.

If you like your operas short and compact, Mark Weiser may have something for you Sunday with the first public performance of his 30-minute "Purgatory," based on a one-act play about one man's hell by Irish poet William Butler Yeats.But don't count on a fluffy light piece in the free opening performance of the fifth annual concert series of Second Presbyterian Church, 4200 St. Paul St. (short remarks at 3:30 p.m. precede the music in Smith Hall).Weiser's music is dark, the mood is eerie and the strings shiver, fitting the drama of Yeats' seven-page play with two speaking (now singing)