Forgive me for staying with Baroque music for another week, but after attending last week’s crackerjack Brandenburg concerti done by the Firebird Chamber Orchestra, I’m thinking a lot about a local cantata pilgrimage.

Back in 2000, the British conductor John Eliot Gardiner took his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists on the road for an entire year to present the surviving J.S. Bach cantatas on the church days for which they were written. They spent most of their time in Europe, then finished the journey in New York.

I’ve watched a documentary about the pilgrimage several times on YouTube, and I’ve got several of the recordings from this journey on CD, and I think it was one of the most worthwhile musical stunts anyone ever pulled. Heard in context, the listener could appreciate better how Bach responded to the differences in text and feast day focus, and gradually come to realize what a great body of work this is.

I heard the Firebird on Saturday in Fort Lauderdale, and it was such a joy to hear the Brandenburg concerti, as well as one of the cantatas (No. 84) and the Second Orchestral Suite, come alive again in the All Saints Episcopal sanctuary. And then I couldn’t help but think of the Gardiner pilgrimage and how all that hard work on this music yielded such magnificent results.

I’m certain Seraphic Fire and the Firebird musicians could do it, and while they probably wouldn’t be able to do a whole year, how about a month? Or two? Wouldn’t it be something to hear them traveling to various churches in South Florida on successive Sundays, singing these works? After a couple concerts, you’d get a fanatic group of Olympics-style fans who wouldn’t be able to get enough, and they’d be there for every performance.

And it would add a certain amount of gravitas to the classical scene here, a scene that is in any case far more active than many outsiders realize. It would tell the rest of the country that here in South Florida are more than enough of the kind of audience that would follow something like this.

What I heard Saturday night was performers who were enjoying themselves immensely, playing a kind of music that presents challenges but also provides such deep nourishment. If you’ve ever had to play less than spectacular music for a while and then get the chance to play something like the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, you know what it is to feel renewed and revivified.

It could be timed, too, to coincide with the annual Tropical Baroque Festival of the Miami Bach Society, which is ongoing this week and continues tonight with Germany’s Oberlinger-Rieger recorder-and-harpsichord duo. Then it could draw on other players and venues to continue the pilgrimage.

There are probably many reasons why my pilgrimage wouldn’t happen, and money likely would be the chief one. But perhaps other funds could be had, enough, anyway, for serious, dedicated musicians to give it their all as they took on the challenges of these works.

Anyhow, that’s my idea. How marvelous it would be to see something like it come true here; we now know from the concerts this weekend that we have the right musicians and organizational culture to do it.