Buckeyes beat Wolverines. No surprises there.

Sold-out chamber music performance 30 minutes later. A surprise only to those who believe Columbus is just a football town.

Chamber Music Columbus, the all-volunteer organization that presents an annual concert series Downtown, hosted the King’s Singers at the Southern Theatre last night in the local presenter’s first sold-out performance of the season. Variety has helped sell the group’s mission in recent years, and vocal music appears to be a particularly strong draw.

Great Britain’s King’s Singers, now over 35 years old, have evolved but remained true to their mission of musical excellence applied to a cappella music of all kinds. The group of six male voices typically mixes challenging, often contemporary literature with more popular fare, and that was certainly the case last night.

The program was more than a nod to the Singers’ latest compact disc, a collection of 20 th- and 21 st-century music thematically tied to Landscape and Time. Whether you were enthralled or wishing for a bit more traditional classical fare was probably a matter of personal taste. Several of the most inventive pieces demanded that the singing describe or evoke such natural phenomena as lightning and spilling water (John McCabe’s Scenes in America Deserta) or birds calling to each other and circling over a river (Jackson Hill’s Remembered Love).

These pieces found the Singers — countertenors David Hurley and Robin Tyson, tenor Paul Phoenix, baritones Philip Lawson and Christopher Gabbitas and bass Stephen Connolly — using their voices in percussive, rhythmic, instrumental and other non-traditional ways.

While this music probed natural cycles and rhythms in ways suggesting the eternal power of nature, others (Cyrillus Kreek’s psalm settings, Richard Rodney Bennett’s The Seasons of His Mercies and Bob Chilcott’s Even Such is Time) explored the human need for faith. Heady stuff for a football Saturday, but the crowd stayed with the Singers throughout, certainly in strong measure because of their seamless, perfectly harmonized delivery — six voices sounding as one.

A series of delightful encores closed the concert. From Billy Joel to Rossini, the King’s Singers gave all the royal treatment