04.02.07
Music Review: Cantus
Washington Post
Andrew Lindemann Malone

It takes audacity for a chorus to program a sequence of songs by Veljo Tormis (a modern Estonian composer), Gordon Lightfoot and Sting. It takes wide-ranging stylistic fluency and a boatload of talent to pull it off. The men's chorus Cantus proved it had all that and more on Friday night in the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium, as its enthusiasm and exquisite singing unified a concert that also included 16th-century polyphony, spirituals and a Bill Withers song.

The songs contributed by the composers named earlier, part of a set of sea-related tunes, showed Cantus at its best. In Tormis's "Incantatio maris aestuosi," small melodic cells lap at each other, building to shattering climaxes; the group navigated the close intervals and spare harmonies with ease, producing sounds both severe and beautiful, and nailing the eerie whistling that helps to conjure a gathering storm.

The group scraped off the Lightfootian cheesiness from "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" to reveal a sturdy melody and heartfelt sentiment. And the gorgeous part-song harmonies in its rendition of Sting's "Valparaiso" never obscured the text, making the lyrics an equal partner to the music.

Refreshingly, Cantus embraces the occasional bit of silliness, opening the second half of the program with a hilarious pantomime-and-percussion number that featured possibly the finest moonwalk ever executed on the Coolidge Auditorium's stage. Moments like that made the sequence of Lee Hoiby's "Private First Class Jesse Givens," a letter from a soldier killed in Iraq set in anguished, clear chords, and the Appalachian folk song "Bright Morning Star" all the more affecting, particularly in Cantus's committed performances.