Straight shooter

CORN BELTER Baritone Nathan Gunn cultivates his Midwestern roots.

That enviable combination of devilish good looks, chiseled pectorals and a lyrical baritone voice at the height of its powers ought to have gone to Nathan Gunn’s head by now. Yet this wholesome, Midwestern family man-slash-superstar opera singer better embodies Ozzie and Harriet than a primo divo. While juggling a household of children along with the kind of acclaim that demands his talents the world over, the 37-year-old vocalist manages to keep his priorities straight.

Gunn spends about nine months of the year performing away from home, but the family remains somewhat intact. “I take one of my five kids with me on trips that aren’t too long during the season, and the whole family with me during the summer,” he says. “I decided a long time ago to spend the money and lose the sleep in order to see them.”

Even fatherhood and the all-consuming performing career haven’t stopped Gunn from finding the time to record his own projects. Just Before Sunrise, which arrived in stores August 7 on Sony Classical, is a soothing amalgam of contemporary song covers ranging from Billy Joel to Sting. These three-minute pop cuts delivered through a silky, warm operatic viewpoint could get listeners genre hopping.

Gunn’s wife, Julie Jordan Gunn, is both musical director and piano accompanist on the album. Their relationship began when they stepped onto campus as undergraduate music students at the University of Illinois.
During the hardships and frustrations that came with being a college music student, Julie quickly learned how to handle him. “I can remember her making me stand on my head sometimes when we practiced,” Gunn recalls, as she tried to calm the angry and frustrated singer down.

This fall semester, Mr. and Mrs. Gunn each begin professorships at the University of Illinois, keeping the musically inclined family firmly planted in the Corn Belt. “My great-grandfather was chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court,” Gunn says, and he has many more relatives here.

The new album also includes songs set to texts by James Joyce, William Butler Yeats and W.H. Auden, a selection that reveals Gunn’s literary sensibilities. That’s not too surprising given that Gunn’s two signature roles have been in bookish operas based on Melville’s Billy Budd and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. An admitted bibliophile and devourer of Greek philosophy, Gunn believes the text is as significant as the music: “Words are very important to me. If the words to a song, the poetry or libretto aren’t something that inspires me, I won’t sing the song,” he says, simply but defiantly.

Apparently, Whitman’s words also inspire Gunn, and he’ll perform the Grant Park Music Festival’s season-ending concerts this week with music often using the good gray poet’s writings. Wartime themes of peace and protest will be sung out in three of Gunn’s favorite composers: Vaughan Williams, John Adams and Britten.

But don’t mistake a “Grant Us Peace” concert for an anti-war platform. “War is a reality and it is, in the truest sense of the word, a pity,” Gunn says. “This is what I think gives power to the music and the text. War for this poet is like a civilized crime. What I mean is that if we want civilization, there will be war. These sorts of themes really inspire me and honor the soldiers that they describe.”

Gunn’s strong, no-nonsense presence is ideal for paying tribute to the men and women in the U.S. armed forces. His grandfather fought at the battle of Okinawa in 1945, and his recording of Adams’s The Wound Dresser—a meditation on the Civil War’s injured—remains a high point in his discography. With such a Whitman-esque understanding of battle’s necessary throes, Gunn’s performance will end the Grant Park season on a tender note.

Gunn sings with the Grant Park Orchestra Friday 17 and Saturday 18.