New Orleans ? The stinking, moldy Orpheum Theater off Canal Street sits silent and abandoned, its stage warped and wood floors buckled, no longer suitable for the likes of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky and Marvin Hamlisch.

Floods from Hurricane Katrina left the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra homeless. Instead of playing in its renowned theater, it has been ricocheting from churches to local universities for a year.

But a Dallas investor’s interest has the area’s performing-arts community hoping for a revival of the historic venue. Richard Weyand, whose new Weyand Properties Inc. bought the historic building for $675,000 in June, has said only that he hopes the orchestra will be able to play there again one day.

To performers, that’s a start, considering that every one of the city’s venues for opera, symphony and large theater productions was closed by the storm and none has reopened.

“I’m thrilled that it’s sold,” said former owner Adelaide Benjamin, an orchestra advisory board member. “I hope that the buyer will let us still play in it without raising our rent too much. I’ve heard that he’s an honest man and that he’s going to do what he says. That’s all I know.”

Weyand got a bargain, since the previous owners paid more than $2 million for it in 1989. That group of New Orleans residents has been trying to sell it for years and said they were seeking assurances from buyers that they had interest in opening it as a performance hall.

The nonprofit theater, with acoustics that some say are better than Carnegie Hall, was already in need of renovation before the flood, theater owners said. They estimate it needs $4 million and at least two years of work. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places and therefore subject to restrictions.

Weyand, an alumnus of Southern Methodist University, has had interests in real estate, energy, sports teams, churches and golf courses in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi over the years and numerous nonprofit and for-profit ventures.

The investor, who did not return phone calls to his Dallas office and Frisco, Texas, home, reportedly has ties to Monroe, La., and has invested money in New Orleans-area businesses in the past. In July, he told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that he is “planning to restore the theater and planning to work closely with the (orchestra), hoping they will use the theater a major portion of its open time.”