Apollo's Fire

Based in Cleveland, Ohio, well removed from the customary centers of historically informed performance, Apollo's Fire has earned recognition as an inventive, widely followed, and critically praised ensemble specializing in Renaissance, Baroque, and early Classical repertory. The group maintains a subscription series of five to seven programs each season, with every concert repeated across a span of three or four days, and it also maintains an active touring schedule that regularly includes venues across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Operating at a remove from entrenched performance circles has allowed Apollo's Fire to explore fresh approaches within the historical-performance movement. Its recordings have earned both strong commercial results and critical notice, appearing at an increased pace since the beginning of the new century; in 2022 the ensemble released a live album drawn from 2018 and 2020 performances of Jeannette Sorrell's O Jerusalem! City of Three Faiths.

Sorrell, a harpsichordist and conductor, established Apollo's Fire in 1992. Having studied harpsichord with Gustav Leonhardt and conducting with Leonard Bernstein and Roger Norrington, she brought impeccable training to the project. She drew together a number of musicians from the Netherlands to form an orchestra committed to the historically informed practices associated with Leonhardt, Anner Bylsma, and Sigiswald Kuijken. The ensemble comprises roughly thirty-five players and regularly engages guest soloists; its size expands or contracts according to the demands of each program, sometimes diminishing to chamber scale or enlarging for choral works with the assistance of its affiliated vocal group, Apollo's Singers. That chorus of approximately twenty voices also enjoys considerable esteem. By the middle of the 1990s Apollo's Fire had secured broad recognition, confirmed by the Noah Greenberg Award it received in 1995. Two recordings issued in 1999—Monteverdi's Vespro Della Beata Virgine and Noël Ancien (Noëls & Carols from the Olde World)—both garnered critical praise and pointed toward further accomplishments.

The 2011 album Come to the River: An Early American Gathering illustrated one strand of the group's work devoted to American folk and traditional music. Apollo's Fire explored Celtic repertory in 2012 with Sacrum Mysterium: A Celtic Christmas Vespers and returned to American sources in 2015 with Sugarloaf Mountain: An Appalachian Gathering. In 2016 the ensemble turned to Sephardic music on Sephardic Journey: Wanderings of the Spanish Jews. Although the group has produced direct anthologies of Baroque arias and choral pieces, its most distinctive projects have included the widely noted 2017 performances and recording of Bach's St. John Passion, BWV 245, presented in both New York and Cleveland. Those live presentations were realized in semi-staged form, with soloists moving about the stage and interacting with one another rather than facing the audience, while members of the chorus mingled among the listeners. In 2018 Sorrell and Apollo's Fire accompanied tenor Karim Sulayman on the album Songs of Orpheus, which received the Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. The following year the ensemble issued a recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons featuring its artist-in-residence, violinist Francisco Fullana. To open its thirtieth-anniversary season in 2022, Apollo's Fire released the live recording of Sorrell's O Jerusalem! City of Three Faiths drawn from earlier performances.