Cantus: Let Your Voice Be Heard
Cantus Recordings CTS 1201. Cantus, prod.; John Atkinson, eng.
DDD. TT: 64:20.
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 Last week was a
busy one for me. I flew out to darkest Minnesota -- the campus of Shattuck St. Mary's
School in Faribault, to be exact -- to observe John Atkinson recording the men's chorus
Cantus for the second time. I stayed for a few days and then high-tailed it to Brooklyn
for a night in my own bed before travelling north to Montreal for the Festival Son et
Image. But during my one night at home, I burned a CD-R to use at the hi-fi show as I went
from system to system -- and the centerpiece of that disc was three songs from Cantus' Let
Your Voice Be Heard: "Loch Lomond," "Danny Boy," and
"Shenandoah." I must have played that last song fifty times over the three days
I was at the show and, rather than tire of it, I came to a new and deeper appreciation of
it the more I heard it. I also had to keep my eye on the disc because more than one
exhibitor tried to nick it or "forget" to return it to me.
"Where can I buy this record?" they'd wail as I
returned it to my pocket. That made me realize I'd never actually reviewed the disc here.
I wrote about last year's
recording trip and I even published an article in Stereophile about the
recording process, but I'd never written about the disc itself. That's a pity, because
it's a fabulously well-recorded disc of wonderfully musical interpretations of folk songs
from around the world. In other words, exactly the sort of good-sounding, real music that
not-so-coincidentally shows off just how good your stereo sounds. The sort of disc we
audiophiles never can get enough of.
Cantus is a men's chorus from Minnesota. The guys got
together while attending college and discovered that a democratically-led ensemble of 12
singer/directors could succeed. Upon graduation, they went pro and have toured,
singing and teaching, ever since.
Let Your Voice Be Heard, their fourth disc together,
is a collection of "folk" songs -- "Our celebration of world music,"
as bass/baritone Erich Lichte says. It gathers African songs and chants beside Indian,
Georgian, Swedish, Hebrew, and Inuit songs, as well as more familiar Scottish, Irish, and
American material. Even if some of the titles sound familiar -- "Were You
There?" "What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor?" "Loch Lomond,"
"Danny Boy," and "Shenandoah" -- the group, individually or
collectively, arranged each one, making them seem shiny and new.
John Atkinson recorded the group spread in a semicircle
between two omnis, using just enough signal from his crossed pair of cardioids to nail the
center image down. The result is a rich, full-bodied sound that reproduces the 12 singers
within your listening room in full-sized (or, depending on your system, scale model)
splendor.
There's only a little room sound supporting the singers,
but that's true to the venue. The disc was recorded in the Concert Hall at Carleton
College -- an intimate (500 seat), modern auditorium with a reflective "tent"
suspended over the seats that focuses the stage sound, giving it a brightly detailed
immediacy. The recording uses the hall's reverberant cushion while minimizing its
unforgiving nature, which simply proves how much recording is an art rather than a
science. By cleverly manipulating the mix and time-delay between his microphone pairs,
John Atkinson was able to retain what was admirable in Cantus' performance without having
to settle for the actual sound of the hall itself.
This means that listeners looking for a lush, reverberant
cushion of air that supports the unaccompanied voices will be disappointed. That wasn't
what the group sounded like at Carleton College, and that wouldn't have been the
appropriate sound for most of this material. What you will hear is honest,
umgimmicky sound that exalts its origin as human breath. Cantus manages to span the sonic
spectrum from deep bass to ineffably sweet falsetto and, through the use of a few props,
even manages to push the limits of digital's dynamic range. The disc really is a corker.
But good as the sound is, what I keep returning to in
Cantus' performances is the way they convey emotions like joy and sorrow. If there's a
sense of longing in "Shenandoah," it is balanced by the foreboding of "She
Moved Through the Fair." If the judges in "Domaredansen" seem solemn, the
Zulu freedom song "One by One" offers hope and promise -- and there's no denying
the giddy glee of "What Shall We do With a Drunken Sailor?" It's a commonplace
to speak of music as being some sort of emotional shorthand, but most recordings seem to
be attempting to convey emotions that are neither sharply focused nor profound. One of Let
Your Voice Be Heard's triumphs is the extent to which its emotions are pointed
and precise. Music has the power to convey this nuance, of course, but it's the rare
musician who has actually mastered that lesson.
And, while they may be young, that's definitely a lesson
that Cantus have learned.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
Let Your Voice Be Heard can be ordered
from Cantus' Website (http://www.cantusonline.org/)
or from Stereophile's order page (https://secure.stereophile.com/stereophile/recordings.shtml).
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