In a few weeks, the Providence Singers will be headed to Mechanics Hall in Worcester to record Lukas Foss’ career-launching cantata The Prairie, written in 1944 when the composer was just 22. Last night, though, audiences got to hear the Singers perform the Foss at Veterans Memorial Auditorium as part of a week-long festival of American choral music sponsored by a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. The chorus was just one of seven groups in the country to receive the federal money.

And if the group sounds anywhere near as good as it did last night, this afternoon’s concert comes highly recommended. That’s at 4 p.m. at Veterans Auditorium and features a number of chestnuts sung by several choirs, including the Singers, which in the past decade or so has made astonishing strides.

There were moments in the Foss of gorgeous, sweeping heart-felt choral numbers that showed just how balanced and well blended this group of 100 voices can be.

But the smartest, most well-crafted offering had to have been Carlyle Sharpe’s Proud Music of the Storm, commissioned by the Singers in 2001. Sharpe, who was on hand for a curtain call, used lines from Walt Whitman for this intense imaginative score.

It certainly seemed to find the singers the most focused, especially in a long a cappella section on the lines “Ah from a little child, thou knowest soul how to me all sounds become music.”

Here Sharpe, who was born in 1965, used close harmonies and striking chord changes in ways that were arresting.

The rest of the piece was scored for soloists, including Rhode Island mezzo Gigi Mitchell-Velasco, who will be featured on the upcoming recording. Sharpe at least seemed completely comfortable with choral idioms, at least in comparison to an early effort by Pulitzer Prize winner John Corigliano, who was represented by a setting of Dylan Thomas’ bucolic reverie Fern Hill. There was something appealingly sweet about Corigliano’s take on Thomas’ lyrical verse, but his writing was rather static, two-dimensional.

Sharpe on the other hand went in for lurching rhythms in a section about dance music, and found ways to use the voice in interesting and unusual ways. The final section paired the chorus and vocal quartet with the throbbing sounds of three bass violins.

The chamber-size orchestra was made up of mostly Boston-area players, with a few Rhode Island Philharmonic members thrown into the mix.

But the Sharpe didn’t have quite the sweep and majesty of the German-born Foss’ Prairie, which put him on the musical map. It was commissioned by the famed choral conductor Robert Shaw, and premiered in 1944. Soon after that, the New York Philharmonic performed the piece, and Foss received instant recognition as an important new voice in American music.