Patrick Dupré Quigley has been performing music for as long as he can remember: in church, hymns lent gravitas to the ritual of Catholic mass; in school, piano lessons and choir practice filled his afternoons; on road trips to visit his grandparents as a child, songs made the hours pass quickly.

But it wasn't until his sophomore year at the University of Notre Dame, after changing majors from chemical engineering to political science and, finally, to music, that Quigley decided to make music his life's work.

''It was something that I was realizing more and more that I simply couldn't live without,'' says Quigley, founder of Miami's professional chamber choir, Seraphic Fire. ``Could I be happy doing something other than music? Maybe, but probably not.''

These days, Quigley does little more than make music and win over fans.

In seven seasons leading Seraphic Fire, he has earned a reputation for artistic excellence and administrative acumen, an uncommon mix in South Florida's adolescent community of cultural nonprofits.

''Patrick is a true cultural entrepreneur, which is someone who's very good at the art that they do but at the same time they're able to find opportunities and really jump on them,'' says Lorenzo Lebrija, Miami program director for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The latest opportunity for Quigley to dream big -- fairy tale big -- arrived in September 2007, when the Knight Foundation awarded Seraphic Fire a $250,000 grant to form a professional chamber orchestra.

Quigley dubbed the new ensemble Firebird Chamber Orchestra, partly in honor of Igor Stravinsky's masterpiece based on a series of Russian folk tales.

The orchestra debuts Thursday at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, with Something Old, Something New, which synthesizes an eclectic arrangement of musical compositions, from Antonio Vivaldi's Concerto for Four Violins to David Diamond's Rounds for Orchestra.

''We really focus on baroque music, classical music and music by American composers,'' Quigley said of Firebird's repertoire. The chamber orchestra will feature 12 to 18 players.

Like Seraphic Fire, the Firebird orchestra is made up of young musicians from across the country. And its aim will be to present classical music in a new way: in a cabaret setting, similar to a jazz club with the audience seated at cocktail tables and a cash bar serving drinks.

Such a setting is anathema to the traditional manner of presenting classical music -- with an orchestra on a stage, far removed from the audience -- but Quigley is unapologetic.

''We're not doing this for the ritual,'' he says. ``We're doing this for the music, and I want to sort of just hack away at the sort of stiff collar, ritualized version of music. Let's do it like jazz. People love going to jazz concerts. You can talk. And you can clap when you like something, and you can have a drink because it's a Friday night and you're out.''

Quigley calls the traditional manner of presenting classical music ''Kabuki,'' after the traditional Japanese theater. ''I think formality kills classical music,'' he says.

WHY IT MATTERS

Seraphic Fire's programs draw from the same wide breadth of European music -- baroque, classical, romantic and contemporary -- as many choirs, except that Quigley strives to infuse the performances with a sense of historical and cultural archaeology.

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