Patrick Dupre Quigley

Conductor Patrick Dupré Quigley is best known as the founder and artistic director of the Miami choir Seraphic Fire. He has also led the Firebird Chamber Orchestra, conducted other groups, and been active as an educator. Quigley was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on December 1, 1977. He founded Seraphic Fire in 2002 and has remained the group's artistic director. He has also conducted the Cleveland Orchestra in Mozart's Requiem in D minor, K. 626, the San Francisco Symphony in a program of Handel, Bach, Ligeti, and Berio, and the National Arts Centre Orchestra and the Kansas City Symphony in performances of Handel's Messiah, HWV 56. Quigley has a longstanding residency at the Aspen Music Festival and School, where he often conducts Seraphic Fire and other groups and also teaches. He and Seraphic Fire also collaborate with the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the University of Miami's Frost School of Music, and the Herb Alpert School of Music at the University of California at Los Angeles. Quigley has championed new music, programming works featuring instrumentalists specializing in contemporary music. He and Seraphic Fire have commissioned new works from a long list of contemporary composers, including Nico Muhly, Christopher Theofanidis, and Ileana Perez Velazquez. Seraphic Fire has issued 15 albums with Quigley as conductor, starting with Beginnings in 2005 and covering a great range of repertory from Hildegard of Bingen to contemporary music. Notable releases include Seraphic Fire's reading of Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 (2013), for which Quigley mounted a viral Internet marketing campaign. The album rose to the number-one spot on a streaming service's classical chart and, for a short period, topped Lady Gaga's release at the time on the consolidated service's all-genre chart. Quigley and Seraphic Fire have been nominated twice for Grammy awards, once for Brahms: Ein deutsches Requiem (Best Choral Performance) and once for A Seraphic Fire Christmas (Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance). In 2021, Quigley and Seraphic Fire released the world premiere recording of Hildegard of Bingen's play Ordo Virtutum. They have recorded for their own Seraphic Fire Media or SFM label, which is distributed by Naxos.