Review: Cantus ends its season with moving music by Jewish composers

For most of its 28 seasons of Twin Cities concerts, male vocal group Cantus has gone out with a bang, a party atmosphere suffusing its pop-flavored "Covers" concerts. But things have taken a quieter turn in recent years, with the group saying farewell until fall with a series of intimate July chamber concerts.

They're different from a typical Cantus concert, not emphasizing the eight men's richly textured harmonies as much as showing off what each can do in a solo setting. This year's incarnation is the group's most ambitious yet.

Cantus customarily delves into many styles and languages, but its latest summer offering focuses exclusively upon music by Jewish composers writing mostly in Hebrew and Yiddish. The program's centerpiece is the work that gives the concerts their title, "and all the days were purple," a song cycle by Alex Weiser that was among three finalists for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Music.

Weiser has created a fascinating soundscape. It's as captivating in the poetry he chose to set as in the haunting mix of strings, piano and vibraphone that weaves between the words sung by five soloists from Cantus' ranks. While balance between singers and instrumentalists was sometimes an issue at the first performance at Minneapolis' MacPhail Center for Music on Tuesday, this is nevertheless a piece that should be experienced.

It shares space on the 75-minute intermission-less program with works by three other American composers, as well as Israel's Nurit Hirsh and France's Maurice Ravel. All the works bear elements of the folk music that has evolved within Eastern European Jewish communities over the past two centuries, some of the lyrics inspired by prayers and liturgical texts.

Weiser's "and all the days were purple" is the most profoundly powerful piece on the program. The composer sets poetry about love, longing and mortality, the vocals almost invariably matching the urgency of the instrumentalists. Two of the piece's eight movements are wordless, and that's when the work is at its most tumultuous and unsettling, vigorous and violent.

But it's a challenge for any unamplified singer to transcend the volume of a five-piece ensemble, especially with this work's intense instrumental interplay. I wished for more tenderness from baritone Jeremy Wong and tenor Alexander Nishibun on their settings of Edward Hirsch's "I was never able to pray" and Rachel Korn's "Benkshaft (Longing)," but then found it in Rod Kelly Hines' wonderfully wistful "Poezye (Longing") and Paul Scholtz's shimmering high notes on a deeply involving setting of Mark Strand's "Lines for Winter."

These concerts are the final ones with Cantus for the group's newest member, tenor Matthew Shorten, and he brought a lovely touch to the song cycle's finale, as well as Ravel's "Kaddisch." Among three songs by American composer Lazar Weiner, the standout interpretation was Samuel Bohlander-Green's infectiously joyous "A Nigun."

A final blessing from composer Jennaya Robison — the new music director of the Twin Cities-based National Lutheran Choir — could have made for a quiet closing, but reverence was cast aside for a spirited encore, a medley from musical theater's most popular celebration of Jewish culture, "Fiddler on the Roof."

Cantus' 'and all the days were purple'

When and where: 7:30 p.m. Fri., Westminster Hall, Nicollet Mall and Alice Rainville Place, Mpls.

Tickets: $5-$36, available at 612-435-0046 or cantussings.org.

Streaming: Friday night's concert will be livestreamed, then available on demand through July 24.

Rob Hubbard is a Twin Cities classical music writer. Reach him at wordhub@yahoo.com.