A vivid reading of a madrigal sequence by Monteverdi and a heartfelt performance of a Victoria hymn stood out Thursday night as the Seraphic Fire chamber choir opened its new series of regular performances in Palm Beach County.
In its 10th season, Patrick Dupré Quigley’s professional chorus has arrived at an enviable place in South Florida musical life, having grown steadily in prestige and accomplishment after its founding at Miami’s Church of the Epiphany in 2002. Its most recent self-released disc, a recording of the two-piano “London” version of Brahms’ Requiem, reached the heights of the iTunes and Billboard charts, an achievement that conceivably could attract the attention of a major label.
One of the best things about the chorus besides the overall excellence of its musicianship is Quigley’s enthusiastic scholarship. He has a way of making the programming of 16th-century Renaissance polyphony sound urgent and vital, which of course it is, but Quigley is able to make casual concertgoers and not just classical music intimates appreciate it.
The first program of Seraphic Fire’s current season, a tribute to the life of the great Spanish Renaissance composer Tomas Luis de Victoria, proves the point. Quigley is using the 400th anniversary of Victoria’s death in August 1611 as a way to survey musical meditations on death from the period, and crucially, compositions largely by Victoria’s Spanish contemporaries, most of them unfamiliar to all but scholarly interest.
The concert Thursday evening at St. Gregory’s Episcopal in Boca Raton opened with Circumdederunt me, a short motet by the first important Spanish classical composer, Cristobal de Morales. The 13-member chorus was in good voice, singing with a pure, classic sound that suited the relative simplicity of this coolly beautiful work.
The Introit from the Requiem mass in Victoria’s Officium Defunctorum, which followed, benefited from much the same approach, though the music was a little more intensely colored, more dramatic. Some of that had to do with Quigley’s forceful tempo and dynamic level. In the next two pieces, both by Palestrina, the effect was different: Here, the Italian composer’s greater fluidity of line made a noticeable contrast with the two Spanish works.
In the Kyrie from Palestrina’s Missa pro Defunctis, and then the motet Sicut cervus, the chorus was looser and freer, an effect heightened by Quigley’s decision to program all four of the opening pieces in one unbroken set. All the entrances were not seamless, but the music still had the quality that makes it so remarkable, that sense of this intricate, lovely structure seemingly coming from nowhere, rising out of a group of people simply standing on a stage.
Works by three lesser-known Spanish masters – Alonso Lobo, Sebastian de Vivanco and Francisco Guerrero – came next, beginning with Lobo’s ravishing Ave Maria in eight parts. Vivanco’s O quam suavis added another color to the sonic mix with a cantus whose critical half-step up hinted ever so gently at Spain’s Arabic heritage, and the singers gave it a slightly keening touch that gave the piece shape. Guerrero’s Pan divino, gracioso, was sweet and simple, and the Lux aeterna from his Missa pro Defunctis grander and more somber, but for both the choir maintained a clear, precise texture that enabled the music to speak with eloquence.
If all that music ultimately is reverent and somewhat distant despite its timeless beauty, that was not the case with Monteverdi’s Lagrime d’Amante al Selpocro dell’Amata (A Lover’s Tears at His Beloved’s Tomb), from his sixth book of madrigals. This is writing of strong personality, full of immediacy and passion right at the surface, and the singers made much of it, beginning with the downward swoops on Ahi lasso! (Alas, I grieve!) in the first madrigal (Incenerite spoglie).
Quigley added an effective crescendo-diminuendo to the closing lines of the third madrigal (Dara la notte il sol), and there was a pretty sense of relaxation to the opening lines of the fourth (Ma te raccoglie, O Ninfa), with its simple major-key opening a change of tone from the fevered minor of the first three madrigals. The drama of the fifth (O chiome, d’or) was quite powerful, with its sudden silences and the sopranos driving the cry Ohime! (Ah, me!) home with insistence and high emotion.
This approach continued into the closing madrigal, Dunque, amate reliquie, with its repeated sighs over the lost Corinna and the tomb where she lies. Here, Quigley’s penchant for harder-edged textures paid off in a performance of absorbing drama, and listeners unfamiliar with this period of music should have noticed how different the music of Monteverdi is from what came before.
The concert closed with the hymn Pange lingua of Victoria, a gorgeous piece, performed with grace and elegance by this fine choir. The cantus here, so different in tone from the Gregorian chants that underlay the other sacred pieces, demonstrated how a skillful composer can shade his whole piece with the harmonic movement it implies, and the result was a hymn of happy devotion, radiantly sung by the choir. The switch toward the end to three-beat measures at the words Laus et iubilatio only added to its blissful effect.
For an encore after extended applause from the smallish house Thursday, Quigley led his crew in Jesus Christ the Apple Tree, the Christmas carol by the English composer Elizabeth Poston. After singing its first verses (which come from an 18th-century American songbook), the singers filed out to the sides of the church to sing the last verse in multi-part canon, blurring the notes in the resonant acoustic and allowing the audience to hear the quality of the group’s individual voices.
This program might not suit purists looking for smoother lines or a more subdued emotional temperature, but as a worthy evening of fine Renaissance music, expertly performed, it was hard to beat.
Seraphic Fire has tried twice before, in Delray Beach and West Palm Beach, to establish a permanent beachhead in Palm Beach County. Here’s hoping that the third time’s the charm for this first-class ensemble, which does so much to raise listener spirits,as well as observer hopes about the health of South Florida’s classical scene.
Seraphic Fire performs this program at 8 tonight at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale, and at 4 tomorrow at the Miami Beach Community Church in Miami Beach. Tickets are $35. Call 305-285-9060 or visit www.seraphicfire.org.