South Florida Classical Review

Patrick Quigley conducted Seraphic Fire Thursday night at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton.

Patrick Dupre Quigley, who built Seraphic Fire from a local church series choir to an internationally recognized ensemble, embarked Thursday on his last series of concerts as the group’s artistic director.

Quigley, who has taken a job as artistic director of Opera Lafayette in Washington, D.C. after 24 years at Seraphic Fire, led a program called “Surround Sound,” in which singers were deployed on all sides of the audience to perform music that ran from Renaissance Italy to the contemporary United States.

Such an arrangement of voices was not unusual in the pre-electronic age, when the only elements were the singers, the conductor and the performance space. As Quigley explained to the audience at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton, this positioning of singers produced “music that is enveloping in every way” and served as “a reminder to people of what otherworldly sound might be like.”

In his remarks to the audience, Quigley said nothing about his impending departure until the end, when he described the ensemble’s aspiration to perform great music both new and old, thanked musicians, audience members and supporters and urged attendance at next season’s concerts, when the choir will be led by his successor, James K. Bass.

A surround-sound experience may seem like an invitation to bathe the audience in waves of vocal resonance, turning the concert into something of an aural massage. And while there were impressive moments of choral grandeur, the atypical arrangement of singers also allowed for unusual clarity, subtle vocal interactions and an immersive experience in an era in which distraction comes so easily.

The deployment of the 30 singers varied. For the Agnus Dei of the Spanish Renaissance composer Tomas Luis de Victoria, singers formed an arc that reached about midway up both sides of the church. The performance came off with unusual transparency and richness, with no sense that spreading out the singers thinned out the sound. Starting with a few voices, the music swelled, subsided and swelled again, in a resonant expression of religious joy and serenity.

The singers were skillfully accompanied by musicians on organ, bass and two violins with Baroque bows.

Of all the striking sounds produced Thursday evening, the most otherworldly belonged to Immortal Bach, a 1988 work by the Norwegian composer Knut Nystedt, inspired by Bach’s vocal work “Komm, süsser Tod” (Come, sweet death). Nystedt starts with Bach’s music and then has the singers hold notes for different lengths of time, creating dense, overlapping harmonies. Walking slowly through the church to form different arrangements, as Quigley conducted from about the midpoint of the nave, the singers held notes for inhumanly long periods, as harmonies swelled, grew more complex and resolved. Nystedt’s Bach retooling finally faded away in a long pianissimo, showing what spacey and captivating effects can be achieved by the human voice.

Another highlight was the short work and the swallow by the contemporary American composer Caroline Shaw. With grave low notes, aching dissonances, long-held chords that faded to near silence, and soaring passages of ascending voices, this was a brief but moving expression of grief and comfort.

The concert ended with works of Claudio Monteverdi, a composer from choral music’s golden age, whose works have long been part of Seraphic Fire’s bread and butter. In Beatus Vir, light, lilting rhythms provided opportunities for brief solo moments, with male and then female voices repeating the words of the Latin text.

“Ave Maris Stella” from Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 may have provided the most surround-sound experience of all, as some singers went to the very back of the church. The performance was one of delicacy and subtlety, with Quigley leading the singers through crescendos that swelled and came to a cadence before the next phrase started up. The piece ended on a grandiose Amen, ornamented, long-held and filling the church with vibrant sound.

Seraphic Fire’s “Surround Sound” will be repeated 8 p.m. Friday at the Church of The Little Flower, Coral Gables; 7:30 p.m. Saturday at All Saints Episcopal Church, Fort Lauderdale; and 4 p.m. Sunday at Miami Beach Community Church. seraphicfire.org

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