Opera Baltimore is turning a stretch of the Jonestown neighborhood into an open-air stage this Sunday, launching a day-long festival that traces a century and a half of shared musical history between Baltimore’s Black and Jewish communities. The inaugural event, called Voices in Solidarity: Baltimore’s Black and Jewish Operatic History Festival, runs from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on August 30 and mixes free pop-up performances with a ticketed evening concert.
The festival begins with pop-up musical performances in the courtyard of the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House, according to WMAR 2 News. From there, attendees can join walking tours connecting sites throughout Jonestown, with the routes linking spaces roughly three or four blocks apart. The day builds toward an evening concert at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, where soprano Sarah Duchovnay and baritone Daniel Rich are set to perform.
Nicole Steinberg, Opera Baltimore’s cultural programs coordinator, said the festival is designed to confront both the harder and more hopeful chapters of that shared history. She said the event addresses both positive and negative aspects of history to help the community move forward and heal, per the station’s report. Steinberg added that music can bring people together in spaces where conversations are difficult, describing it as an entry point that opens spaces to people who may not otherwise feel welcome.
A Century and a Half of Shared Artistic Ground
Organizers point to Black and Jewish communities having shared artistic influences for roughly a century and a half, a connection the festival’s programming is meant to make visible. One touchstone is Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording of the anti-lynching anthem “Strange Fruit,” which the same report notes was composed by a Jewish composer-songwriter. That composer was Abel Meeropol, a New York high school teacher and son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who wrote the words as a 1937 poem under the pseudonym Lewis Allan, according to PBS. Meeropol was reportedly moved to write the poem after seeing a photograph of a 1930 mob lynching in Indiana…