By Robert Croan In brief but informative prefatory remarks about Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Brett Karlin — conductor and artistic director of the Master Chorale of South Florida — described this grand oratorio as a 19th-century equivalent of a modern Broadway spectacular. It is certainly a major undertaking for a community-based choral organization, and the Chorale’s … [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...]
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...]