Nathan Gunn – Wigmore Hall

Nathan Gunn performed at the Wigmore Hall, London with Julie Gunn on piano.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

There was an endearing charm to this Wigmore Hall recital of American song given by Nathan Gunn and his wife, Julie, at the keyboard. They present a handsome couple walking onto the august platform of London’s oldest recital hall, she in scarlet, he in a smart evening suit. It is clear that they both love performing, and are at one in their domestic and academic partnership at the music faculty of the University of Illinois.

Their programme covered a wide range of Americana, opening with ‘Opera Singer’, a neat paraphrase  of the operatic life, by writers Joel McCrea and Mark Kornweibel, with a musical introduction from Tosca and a refrain from Carmen.

It was a happy introduction to a series of party pieces that were linked in convivial fashion by the Gunns, him standing aside for her solo breaks, then, singing ‘love songs to her over the piano’, as one song lyric put it.

There were tongue twisters from Charles Ives, the elder statesman of American song, evoking a circus band and the entry into heaven of General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, songs like Berlin’s ‘I Love a Piano’ and Musto’s ‘Recuerdo’ in the style of Scott Joplin, and in similar vein, though more elaborate in accompaniment, songs by William Bolcom, almost too verbose for their own good, excepting that favourite, ‘Black Max’.

One welcomed the simplicity of Ben Moore’s setting of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, Steve Goodman’s ‘City of New Orleans’, a song that Glen Campbell might have written, and the fetching ‘Voices from World War II’ by Gene Scheer that evoked such disparate locations as Howard Hawks’ House, Omaha Beach with its chilling refrain “young blood in holy water”.

Baritone Nathan owned these songs, as he did the powerfully projected ‘Brother Can You Spare a Dime’. Another arresting number, ‘This is the Life’, by Alan Jay Lerner and Kurt Weill, a lengthy soliloquy of shifting moods, was the centrepiece of the recital, confirming his prowess as a dramatic singer, lyrical and resolute.

The lighter songs from mainstream Broadway were confounded on a number of counts, size of voice, and the hall itself, where from the rear stalls it had been a problem to hear all the words in the selections, or be drawn into their more intimate atmosphere.

The balance between voice and piano was often in the favour of the latter, which a quick balance check would have rectified by closing the Steinway’s lid! Nevertheless it would be a hard heart that didn’t respond to the gentle whimsy of Van Heusen’s ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’ and Arlen and Koehler’s Cotton Club number, ‘I’ve Got the World On a String’, given with its rarely heard verse.

Trickier to pull off was ‘Lonely Town’, the singer relishing the colloquial idiom of the Betty Comden/Adolph Green lyric, but the pianist finding it harder to meld Bernstein’s accompaniment to the flow of his tune which really requires a band to sustain it. It goes without saying that Nathan’s voice and style is first class, but it would have been interesting for the audience to have a little more evidence of the singer inhabiting each role, as he did in the Gunn songs, with a clearer delineation between styles, and an appreciation of the vocal vernacular that marks these songs out as peculiarly American.

After the concluding Irish traditional ‘The Parting Glass’, Nathan and Julie let their hair down with ‘Ragtime Cowboy Joe’, a rowdy paean to an American legend, who sings his sheep to sleep in a basso profundo, an appropriate concluding touch.

Adrian Edwards