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Fuma Sacra is recognized as one of the country's most exciting and important chamber choirs specializing in early music. Founded in 1989, the ensemble has been consistently acclaimed by critics and audiences for the passionate and virtuosic performances which have consistently "left the audience gasping in amazement." (Classical NJ).
Although the ensemble is committed to historically informed performance, Fuma Sacra's concerts are even more widely known for their innovative programming, passionate performance, and depth of artistry. This reflects Fuma Sacra's belief that every great work of art, from any time, not only reveals the cultural world of the composer, but teaches us what it means to be fully human and fully alive.
Andrew Megill and Fuma Sacra have a special love for the music of J.S. Bach, frequently sharing his choral masterworks with Princeton audiences. For the Westminster Bach Festival each summer and the Princeton Bach Festival each January, Fuma Sacra has presented performances of St John Passion (BWV 245), St Matthew Passion (BWV 244), Magnificat (BWV 243), and B Minor Mass (BWV 232), as well as over forty cantatas. Fuma Sacra's interest in J.S. Bach has led the ensemble to discover and resurrect music of earlier Baroque composers, such as Monteverdi, Carissimi, Antonio Caldara, Johann Hermann Schein, Heinrich Schütz, Johann Pachelbel, and Dietrich Buxtehude, as well as J.S. Bach's contemporaries, including George Frideric Handel, Georg Philipp Telemann and Jan Dismas Zelenka.
Fuma Sacra’s repertoire extends well beyond the Baroque. The ensemble regularly performs music ranging from Renaissance polyphony to newly-written works by composers such as Andrew Bleckner, Peter Maxwell Davies, Jon Magnussen, Joanne Metcalf, Arvo Pärt, Augusta Read Thomas, and Stephen Stuckey.
Highlights of past seasons include collaborations with leading period instrument ensembles and soloists, including Piffaro, Tempesta di Mare (Directors: Gwyn Roberts & Richard Stone), and Brandywine Baroque, Nancy Wilson, John Holloway, and Julianne Baird. Fuma Sacra has also sung with Dalton Baldwin in an evening of Schubert and with Paul Salamunovich in a performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Mass in G Minor, and made their European debut at the Festival dei Dui Mondi in Spoleto, Italy. |
