Cheese Lords Serve Up A Tasty Teutonic Tribute

Almost any Renaissance music counts as "rarely heard" for the average concertgoer, but even early-music geeks might have been stumped by the esoteric lineup of little-known composers in Friday night's performance by the Suspicious Cheese Lords.

Performing at Christ Church on Capitol Hill in the third of this year's Washington Early Music Festival concerts, the Cheese Lords -- a local a cappella men's choir -- sang through untraveled back roads of the Germanic Renaissance, tracking the festival's Teutonic theme.

Lassus was the sole heavyweight composer represented, but that doesn't mean the lesser-knowns wrote lesser music. The Cheese Lords introduced gorgeous pieces by Georg Prenner, Ludwig Senfl and Adam Gumpelzhaimer.

Renaissance choral music is an intricately woven, polyphonic fabric of multiple voice parts moving semi-independently. Composers emphasized kaleidoscopic colors, blending them solely to lend expression to the text. So even the slightest discolorations in performance tend to stick out like pulled threads. For instance, the opening of Lassus's "In Monte Oliveti" (recounting Christ's prayer on the Mount of Olives) is somber yet intense. The Cheese Lords captured the mood hauntingly, but quickly lost it with an off-color vowel on the word "monte." In Prenner's "Filiae Jerusalem," phrases ended beautifully together, but didn't start out that way.

The best singing came in music that the Cheese Lords know best -- Senfl's masterly "Miserere mei Deus" and "Virgo Prudentissima/Fortuna Desperata." The latter, introduced as something of a 16th-century mash-up, found the Lords interlacing a separate tune within the main song. Here the fabric was tight, colors pure, with excellent sounds resonating from basses and tenors.

From what started 12 years ago as a series of singalong dinner parties, the Cheese Lords have evolved, despite the name, into a soulful ensemble far above suspicion.

-- Tom Huizenga