By Robert Croan Seraphic Fire’s third annual Enlightenment Festival – two weekend programs each performed in four South Florida venues – is devoted to the church cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach, some of the most sublime music in the Western civilization canon. It’s also some of the most difficult music for present-day performers, technically and stylistically, but with … [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 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...]