While the concert programs of the Minneapolis-based male vocal group Cantus can sometimes get off theme, the one that opens its 2019-20 season is pretty consistent: One Giant Leap is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and, in a broader sense, the ability of the stars to inspire us to stretch our boundaries.

And there is some impressive stretching going on in the programming, as the concerts feature four world premieres and another U.S. premiere. Asking audiences to accept so much unfamiliar fare is a giant leap indeed, but it was clear that the crowd at Minneapolis Westminster Concert Hall Thursday evening was in full support, judging from the way audience members started shouting, whooping and clapping the moment the last syllable of each song left the singers lips, often disrupting meditative moods.

This admirably focused program is full of homages to science and the sky, wonder and discovery. And all eight voices were consistently strong in the group, the harmonies as warm and inviting as the down comforter youre breaking out this weekend.

Never more so than on Stars by Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds, which required the eight singers to run their fingers over the rims of half-filled (half-empty?) glasses to produce an eerie soundscape. It proved a haunting performance, as did the groups reverent reading of Vicente Chavarrias Follow the Drinking Gourd, a 19th-century song full of Underground Railroad information for Canada-bound escaped slaves.

The expertise that Cantus demonstrated last summer in trading tunes on a Franz Schubert song cycle was shown not to have dissipated a bit by a lively quartet on the composers Flucht. And there were no works more transporting than the two by Minneapolis composers that closed the main program: Catherine Daltons Silver Deity of Secret Night and Cantus bass Chris Foss Beyond, a setting of a Katharine Lee Bates poem that sounded as if it may have been the anthem of exploration around which the whole program was built.

That songs awestruck wonder made the absence of such a quality from some other pieces all the more noticeable. While there was brisk energy in Camille Saint-Saens Aux Aviateurs, it didnt bring the concerts first half to the kind of climactic close one may desire. And one rapidly pattered movement from Mohammed Fairouzs A Source of Light gave short shrift to that composers gifts.

While I enjoyed the groups return to the lush sound on which it was founded 24 years ago at Northfields St. Olaf College on a new work by a St. Olaf student, Grace Brigham (Discoveries), the concerts encore left me saddened. By yukking it up through a mocking version of Space Oddity David Bowies tale of an astronauts existential despair I felt the performance not only disrespected Bowies memory, but threw the concerts whole premise into question. While offering lip service to some of the tragedies that have accompanied space exploration in between-song speeches, the music contained no sense of the risk, loss of innocence or questioning of the quest that are surely part of it. By evenings end, this look upward had come to seem quite an incomplete picture.

Who: Cantus

What: One Giant Leap

When and where: 3 p.m. Sunday, Trinity Lutheran Church, 115 N. Fourth St., Stillwater; 11 a.m. Thursday, Colonial Church of Edina, 6200 Colonial Way, Edina; 7:30 p.m. Oct. 19, Ordway Concert Hall, 345 Washington St., St. Paul; 3 p.m. Oct. 20, Wayzata Community Church, 125 Wayzata Blvd. E., Wayzata

Tickets: $43-$10, available at 612-435-0046 or cantussings.org

Capsule: The fine singing inspires, but this Leap doesnt go deep.

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Review: Cantus offers well-sung songs of stars and space - St. Paul Pioneer Press