Sunayama (Live)

Album review

Recordings made since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 have had various responses to the calamity, but this release by the small male choir Cantus isn't exactly one of them. It was made in mid-March of 2020, just as everything was shutting down, and the group members thought these might be their final performances. There is arguably a special intensity in the choir's work here, notably in the intense conclusion to Hugo Alfvén's Gryning. The program actually isn't intended to reflect the pandemic; it's made up of pieces in the choir's touring repertory at the time. Yet, it has a quality of mysteriously seeming to fit, which is perhaps another way of saying that Cantus chooses material with some depth that touches on the evanescence of life. The individual performances were shown on streaming video during the pandemic's first months. They have the trademark variety of this group, ranging from Hildegard of Bingen to Billy Joel; they begin with This Is My Song, here credited to Sibelius alone (it was the creation of poet Lloyd Stone and composer Ira B. Wilson), one of Cantus' standards, and a tune that grabs the attention effectively. This is certainly worth having as a pandemic memento, but it is attractive entirely independently of that.

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