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DAVID HOOSE just won the 2005 Ditson Conductor’s Award "in recognition of exceptional commitment to the performance of works by American composers." Last weekend, he led the Cantata Singers in an exceptional program of American choral music: "Boston Bred," featuring six composers who’ve been closely associated with the Cantata Singers. Two of them — Irving Fine and Donald Sur — died young. The other four, very much alive, were in the audience. Five of the pieces are in a late-20th-century Romantic tradition — beautifully crafted, vocally gratifying, expressive settings of British and American poems, unsentimental, yet radiating sweetness. The chorus and orchestra delivered all of these with confident eloquence and affection.

William Cutter is the Cantata Singers’ associate conductor, and his spacy, transparent To See a World (as in Blake’s "To see a World in a Grain of Sand"), barely two minutes long, was commissioned to celebrate Hoose’s 20th anniversary leading the group, in 2002. Charles Fussell’s Invocation, setting formal quatrains by May Sarton ("Come out of the dark earth. . . . Come into the pure air"), was commissioned to celebrate the installation of the new president of Simmons College; Hoose made a dark orchestration of Fussell’s original piano version. Marjorie Merriman’s 1982 setting of her friend Harper Monroe’s "The Garland," a poem about spring and new life, exudes, as she describes, "resonant phrases and expansive triads." Irving Fine’s austerely elegant The Hour Glass (1949) sets six masterly short poems by Elizabethan/Jacobean poet/playwright Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s great elegist. And Sur’s Sonnet 97 (1999), his last piece, is calmly iambic, a restrained setting of Shakespeare’s "How like a winter hath my absence been/From thee" — perhaps Sur’s elegy for himself.

The most ambitious piece, and the least sweet, was John Harbison’s 1975 cantata, The Flower-Fed Buffaloes — a complex, dramatic exploration of the gap between noble American ideals and bitter actualities. It opens with the music loping along, Gene Autry–style, to Vachel Lindsay’s tender lament for the pre-railroad prairies, until the clanging bell of an oncoming train ends the section. Baritone David Kravitz, in ringing voice, sang Hart Crane’s prayer ("Enrich my resignation"), which explodes into the cacophonous choral outcry of Michael Fried’s "Depths" ("America, like a hounded shark, not knowing where to turn,/Makes for the depths/Taking us down"). Kravitz then recited Gary Snyder’s more optimistic "Above Pate Valley" over twinkling piano and pitched percussion; that led into the long slow diminuendo of Lindsay’s visionary "The Amaranth." The Flower-Fed Buffaloes sounds as fresh and urgent now as it did 30 years ago. Some things, alas, don’t change.

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with the chamber-opera group Intermezzo was a disappointment: the opera, a new commission, was a musical and dramatic dud about the complex relationship between French poets Paul Verlaine and Artur Rimbaud. And for half an hour, my second encounter was equally unsatisfying. This time the bad opera was Seymour Barab’s 1957 one-acter, A Game of Chance, a negligible morality tale about three women who yearn, respectively, for money, fame, and love. A mysterious figure arrives to give them what they want. But it doesn’t make them happy. The end. Barab owes more than he should to Leonard Bernstein’s 1952 Trouble in Tahiti, and a couple of years later, Samuel Barber showed them all how to do it with his inspired Hand of Bridge. Stage director Kevin M. Kline and designer William Fregosi placed the action, as company director John Whittlesey put it, in a "Donna Reed kitchen." The singers — Jane Eison, Sarah Davis, Sarah Whitten, and Christopher Hutton — fulfilled Barab’s requirements but wasted their time learning this vacuous material. Pianist Stephen Yenger played better than the music deserved.

The second part of the bill, however, was a great work: Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht’s 1933 mock morality play and Passion parody Die Sieben Todsünden, done in English as The Seven Deadly Sins. Two sisters, sharing one name, one heart, and one bank account (only one sings, though), set out across America to make their fortune so they can support their greedy and dysfunctional family in the mythical state of Louisiana. They learn that Gluttony is bad because it’s harder to sell your body if you’re overweight. ("There’s no market for hippos in Philadelphia," as the translation by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman puts it.) Lust is bad only if you spend your capital on the person after whom you lust.

Marc Astafan’s fluid, inventive staging fleshed out the characters, adding the spice of a little father-son incest (daddy Whittlesey likes to sit his hunky number-one son, Brendan Daily, on his lap) and even a music lesson (mommy, full-bearded Paul Guttry, makes son Aaron Sheehan — Intermezzo’s pouty Rimbaud — sing for his supper, oratorio style). The two Annas, Beckett-like, arrive inside steamer trunks. The cast was remarkably efficient changing the minimal sets. Not only could they all sing well (though Catherine Lee, as the sullen, speaking Anna, didn’t have to), they also created vivid if sometimes appalling figures. Auden and Kallman make everyone work to get their English across; here the diction was exemplary.

And mezzo-soprano Krista River, from Emmanuel Music, made a stunning Anna I. This part doesn’t have to be sung beautifully to work, and it often isn’t. But River’s luscious voice was a treat. She injected words with both meaning and nuance. And she moved on stage as if she’d lived there all her life. James Busby supplied a riveting piano accompaniment, and even if everyone else had been terrible, his playing alone would have brought this scintillating, seductive, scary score to life.