Americans are big into Halloween. That astute observation comes from Piers Adams, a British musician who crosses the Atlantic each fall to bewitch listeners with the mesmerizing trills of his recorder, conjuring demons, goblins and bad dreams from the Baroque era.

Adams leads Red Priest -- a quartet named for the flame-haired cleric and composer Antonio Vivaldi -- that opens the St. Martha-Yamaha Concert Series in Miami Shores on Saturday.

Ever since the ensemble released its Nightmare in Venice CD in 2000, he says, it has been asked to play music from the album on U.S. tours.

``For some reason, you tend to go very big into Halloween over there, so we always end up playing our big Nightmare in Venice Halloween spectacular,'' Adams said, speaking from his home in England last week. ``It's actually nice to come back to it each year. It's a funky program, and we rather like doing it.''

If ``funky'' seems an odd adjective for Baroque music, well, that's because Red Priest is an unusual Baroque ensemble, given to creeping onstage in dark-hooded capes, employing atmospheric lighting and even fog machines to amp up the ambience for Vivaldi's La Notte concerto, otherwise known as The Nightmare.

Red Priest brings drama to chamber music, but that's not why Paul Posnak, a piano performance professor at the University of Miami and founding artistic director of the St. Martha's series, booked the group.

``Under all the theatricality, all the costumes, these are serious musicians and scholars,'' Posnak said. ``People are going to be dazzled.''

Since winning an international competition in 1985, Adams has been regarded as one of the world's recorder virtuosos. He founded Red Priest in 1997 as an outlet for his creativity as well as his musical talent. Too many classical performers, he says, leave their personalities out of the music.

Joining Adams on the U.S. tour -- in leather pants, lace-up bodices and other quasi-Baroque garb -- will be harpsichordist Howard Beach, cellist Angela East and Nova Scotia fiddler David Greenberg, filling in for regular violinist Julia Bishop. (Bishop is Adams' offstage partner; she's staying home with their 4-year-old daughter.)

Within their first few years together, Red Priest's musicians had exhausted the repertoire written for recorder, harpsichord, cello and violin and began going farther afield.

``A lot of things that we play we've had to arrange, reduce or expand to fit our instruments,'' Adams said.

For example, as Vivaldi wrote it, La Notte begins with a small ensemble softly playing a short, staccato phrase not unlike John Williams' ominous Jaws motif. The Red Priest arrangement opens with East scratching out Vivaldi's theme on her cello. The recorder comes in soon after, with Adams warbling like a banshee.

``We really get into the drama of it,'' he said. ``It's a strange and sinister piece of music.''

Would Vivaldi mind? Adams thinks not. After all, the composer wrote two versions of the concerto, one for bassoon and one for flute/recorder.

In fact, he says, when he and his colleagues learn new repertoire they become more committed to the music than an ensemble that performs it note for note.

``It's hard to describe what we do,'' Adams said. ``We take pieces we like, and we sit around in a room and we just start [playing]. We get ideas and we fool around, and sometimes, the fooling around stays. A year later -- after many arguments and much bloodshed -- we have a result.''

Red Priest's upcoming Bach masterworks CD, Johann, We're Only Dancing -- a title that pays tribute to David Bowie as well as Bach -- was months in the making.

``We've done an awful lot of arranging there, and we're sort of bracing ourselves for the critical reaction,'' Adams said.

The arrangements for Nightmare in Venice are less irreverent, in part because they're by more obscure composers, including Robert Johnson. The 17th century Englishman, who wrote music for Shakespeare, is represented by his English Fantasy Suite, complete with The Satyrs' Masque and The Witches' Dance.

Beneath the fierce Catholic-Protestant conflicts of the time, superstition ran rampant. There are ghosts and witches in Shakespeare's plays because many Elizabethans believed in them.

``Most of our program has something to do with the theme of other-worldliness,'' Adams said. ``It's a fascinating area, how these underground belief systems carried on despite the way the church would try to push them down.''

Curiously enough, 250 years after Tartini wrote his The Devil's Trill sonata, Red Priest will perform it in a Catholic church at the Archdiocese of Miami headquarters.

St. Martha's pastor, the Rev. Federico Capdepon, can be counted on to open the evening with his usual pronouncement: ``This concert series is nonreligious, but all music is inevitably spiritual.''

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