There Lies the Home, a new Cantus CD, released

There Lies the Home, the sixth CD of Minnesotan male-voice choir Cantus recorded by Stereophile editor John Atkinson, is released this week.

Recorded straight to hard disk at 88.2kHz with 24-bit resolution, There Lies the Home features a set of works about the sea, including Peter (P.D.Q. Bach) Schickele's whimsical "Jonah's Song," with its piratical rolled rrrrs, an arrangement for unaccompanied voices of Sting's "Valparaiso," from his 1996 Mercury Falling CD, and an arrangement for solo baritone, cello, and guitar of Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."

The title There Lies the Home is taken from the lyric from one of Sir Charles Stanford's five Songs of the Sea, Op.91, for solo baritone, presented here in the composer's reduction for voice and piano. The CD's program is bookended by new works from contemporary American composer Edie Hill. Her delightfully tonal "A True Heart Is Waiting," commissioned by Cantus, ends the CD, while a contemplative rearrangement of that work's opening opens.

The June 2005 sessions for the CD took place in the warmly reverberant acoustic of the Great Hall of Sioux Falls' Washington Pavilion. Recordist John Atkinson used a minimal signal path for the recording, with the microphone outputs amplified by high-end preamps and converted immediately to hi-rez digital, with no mixing console or other unnecessary hardware used. All subsequent editing, mixing, and mastering, as well as the final conversion to the CD's "Red Book" data format, was performed with the maximum possible resolution and quality.

"What I hear when I listen to There Lies the Home," writes Wes Phillips, "is an enchanting performance that freezes forever a single point in time—a point actually made up of many other moments." There Lies the Home costs $16.95 plus S&H and is available for purchase on Stereophile's e-commerce page. We hope you enjoy listening to There Lies the Home" as much as we did making it.

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