Maybe those enormous wigs that sit atop the unsmiling faces and fussy court dress in portrait after portrait make us assume that there was something staid, stuffy and rigid about the music of the Baroque era.

But in reality, a young German composer on the make in the early 18th century would have found himself in the middle of a highly varied sound world in which several distinct musical styles were making themselves heard all over Europe. Joining all those styles and refashioning, burnishing and elevating them to a more lofty level would be George Frideric Handel's legacy.

''The point of all of this is that Handel was a great synthesist,'' says Henry Lebedinsky, whose early-music quartet Tableau Baroque will perform four Handel's Inheritance concerts Thursday through July 26 in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. ``From French, Italian and German music he created something new, and there are very few other composers who were able to do that.''

Tableau Baroque's hour-long programs will demonstrate how Handel became Handel though performances of his compositions and the music of his contemporaries Reinhard Keiser, Johann Schelle and Nicolaus Strungk, whose names are known mostly only to scholars. Lebedinsky, the 3-year-old group's keyboardist, will be joined by countertenor Ian Howell, violinist and countertenor Michael Albert and cellist Brian Howard.

Each has performed with Seraphic Fire, the Miami-based professional chamber choir that will feature the Philadelphia-based group in the second concert of its new summer series. Director Patrick Dupré Quigley, who founded Seraphic Fire in 2002, had been thinking about such a series for some time, says Lorenzo Lebrija, who joined the choir as president and chief executive officer in March.

''We realized that as a choir we could not perform during the summer, because our members are traveling or singing in festivals, and they need some time off,'' Lebrija says. ``But there are still a lot of people in South Florida during the summer, and Patrick . . . wanted to bring them something.''

Handel's Inheritance is as much musical travelogue as it is the story of Handel's early work. The concert will be divided into three sections for the places Handel lived before moving to London: the area in and around Halle, the Saxon town where he was born in 1685; Hamburg, and Italy and Hanover.

One of the pieces in the first section of the program is an allemande by Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, Handel's first and only formal teacher during his boyhood. From Halle, Handel traveled north to Hamburg, where, Lebedinsky says, ''he learned to please the crowd'' by trying his hand at opera. There he encountered Keiser, a substantial but much-overlooked composer represented on this concert by selections from his 1703 opera Claudius. Seeking to further his opera career, Handel went to Italy in 1706 at the invitation of one of the Medici princes. He worked in Florence, Rome and Venice and heard the music of composers such as Giovanni Bononcini and Alessandro Stradella.

He made his first trip to London in 1710, where he was quickly noticed by Queen Anne. Returning to the German states, he worked as Kapellmeister (someone in charge of music-making) to the elector of Hanover. After a year or so, he applied for a leave to return to London. Things got complicated in 1714 when his former boss moved to England, too -- as King George I. Handel became a British citizen in 1727. He would live in England for the rest of his life, and at his death in 1759, the renowned composer of the still wildly popular Messiah would be buried in Westminster Abbey.

Lebedinsky, 33, director of music at St. Alban's Episcopal Church in Davidson, N.C., says the members of Tableau Baroque will talk to the audience about the works they're introducing as a more direct way to get the music's message across.

''Tableau Baroque is not creating a historic performance,'' Lebedinsky says. ``We are creating a modern performance for July 2009, not 1700. This is art music for now, and art music for the future, and when we play music that's 300 years old, we need to give you the tool kit to handle it.''

The program aims high, but Lebrija says Seraphic Fire believes its audiences can make the leap, even in the summer.

''If people are in town, and we can provide them with good classical programming, we shovuld do it,'' he says. Seraphic Fire is charging an enticing $10 less than usual for it summer-series tickets. So far, so good: Lebrija rates the first concert in June, which featured Christian gospel music, as one of the most popular the choir has ever given in terms of single-ticket sales.

''If it keeps going the way it's going,'' he says, ``I won't have laid-back summers anymore.''

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