By Robert Croan “Happy we!”/”Wretched lovers!”/”Galatea, dry they tears!” That’s the plot, in a nutshell, of Acis and Galatea, Handel’s pastorale opera, first performed in London in 1718, given a rare (and splendidly realized) revival by Seraphic Fire to conclude the group’s two-week Enlightenment Festival in South Florida. The shepherd Acis and the sea nymph … [Read more...]
Soloists enlighten Seraphic Fire’s secular Bach cantatas
By Robert Croan The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, gave rise to individual freedoms that we now take for granted, among them the revolutionary concepts of liberty, equality and brotherhood. The splendid South Florida vocal-instrumental ensemble Seraphic Fire, founded and directed by Patrick Dupré Quigley, is celebrating these ideals – no less timely … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire gives 12th-century mystic the respect she deserves
Posthumous fame came very late for the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen, but her rediscovery in the late 20th century some 800 years after she died has been a salutary achievement for the appreciation of early music and the music of women composers. That isn’t to say that Hildegard’s idiom, which consists of her own special style of plainchant, blends smoothly into the … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire’s women stellar in all-Vivaldi program
Late in his life, he was “an old man with a mania for composing,” but the Rev. Antonio Vivaldi’s musical productivity was also stoked by his decades of service on behalf of the conservatory-orphanage for girls and women known as the Ospedalle della Pietà in his native Venice. Novelists and filmmakers have been unable to resist the salacious possibilities of a red-haired … [Read more...]
Two premieres add breadth to Seraphic Fire Christmas
Seraphic Fire’s Christmas concerts have become more than a South Florida tradition over the Miami choir’s 17 seasons. This year’s holiday program was first heard in Vermont and Connecticut at the beginning of the mnnth before the group returned home and opened a long series of Christmas concerts that will last through Dec. 16. The singers opened their Florida shows Thursday … [Read more...]
Pärt’s ‘Passio’ gets rigorous Seraphic Fire reading
As we move further past the high-water mark of minimalism, the stature of its major practitioners can be seen more clearly in our rearview. A performance Saturday night of the Passio, a 1982 setting of the Passion according to St. John by the eminent Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, now 82, brought something particular about Pärt’s work into high relief: He is the purest and … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire’s ‘St. Matthew Passion’ simply glorious
By Robert Croan You don’t have to be a believer to be moved – overcome with emotion, even – by J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Although Bach composed this work for a Lutheran Good Friday service in 1727, repeating it with revisions in subsequent years, it has survived as a concert work. Patrick Dupré Quigley, director of Seraphic Fire’s splendid South Florida … [Read more...]
Lang’s ‘Little Match Girl Passion’ makes moving impact in Seraphic Fire performance
By Robert Croan In prefatory remarks to Seraphic Fire’s January concerts, director Patrick Dupré Quigley told audiences that the featured work, David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion, is such a strong piece that no other contemporary choral work could stand up to it on the same program. Instead, Quigley balanced the 40-minute oratorio with three Renaissance motets. … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire opens with brilliant, vigorous Monteverdi
Claudio Monteverdi was a man ahead of his time, a trailblazer in the then-new form of opera and a composer who approached his mostly vocal output with fealty to the words and a concern for their expressive power that was paramount. To begin its 16th season of concerts, the Seraphic Fire choral group presented about an hour’s worth of excerpts from Monteverdi’s 1640 … [Read more...]
World premiere Easter work, Schütz stand out at Seraphic Fire
By Robert Croan Bach’s jubilant, elating Easter Oratorio (BWV 249) was the featured item in advance announcements of Seraphic Fire’s Easter weekend concerts (seen Friday night in Fort Lauderdale’s Sanctuary Church), but in the event, two shorter works on the first half of the program — one brand-new, the other older than Bach — provided the event’s most rewarding moments. … [Read more...]