The Justice

A quartet of Boston musicians, proudly featuring in their ranks Brandeis music professor and Lydian String Quartet violinist Daniel Stepner, performed a charming collection of beloved classic songs before a lively and appreciative audience in the Slosberg Recital Hall last Saturday night. The audience, which nearly filled the hall, came to hear Stepner, soprano Nancy Armstrong, baritone Robert Honeysucker and viola de gamba player Laura Jeppesen perform both famous and lesser-known songs by George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington and Jerome Kern, as well as two solo instrumental pieces by contemporary composers.

The concert truly came into its own when Armstrong took the stage for her first solo piece, Gershwin's "Vodka"- a short and clever paean to the composer's love/hate relationship with his drink of choice-which inspired a few knowing laughs from the audience. Armstrong especially shined in Ellington's melancholy "I Got it Bad (and That Ain't Good)." Setting aside the coquettishness that characterized many of her other performances, Armstrong delivered the classic lament with matter-of-fact dignity, leaving the melodrama to Stepner's mournful violin line.

One of the evening's signature conceits (the accompaniment was provided by an electric violin and an electric viola de gamba rather than the traditional band or piano) worked better in some pieces than others, but in their solo pieces, both instrumentalists took center stage. Jeppesen performed Stepner's own composition for solo gamba, an ingenious adaptation of the traditional blues sound to an instrument whose heyday occurred hundreds of years before blues arrived on the scene. Stepner proved to be equally adept as a performer. He portrayed the unhurried and introspective mood of his solo piece's first movements with great sensitivity, but stood out most in the insouciant, Western-flavored final movement.

Baritone Robert Honeysucker's most moving performance came in the unabashedly sentimental Cole Porter standard "In the Still of the Night," when Honeysucker finally let loose his full dynamic range, imbuing the tender pianissimos and the brash fortissimos with the same dramatic weight and sending his powerful voice ringing through the hall at the song's romantic climax.

The program was also liberally sprinkled with duets both light and dramatic, although the lighter pieces drew the most applause from the audience-including old favorites like "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" and "De-Lovely."

Armstrong and Honeysucker's mature and confident voices complemented each other beautifully, and the greatest pity of the evening was that these particular arrangements of the songs gave the two singers so few opportunities to harmonize with each other. The one piece that did provide that opportunity, Ellington's "On a Turquoise Cloud," was one of the evening's few missteps, an entire song sung only with "ooohs" and "ahs" that caused some unintentional laughs and suffered from shaky pitch and sporadic balance problems.

Despite these occasional disappointments, it was a delightful evening of good fun and great music, and the audience showed their appreciation with a standing ovation which the performers rewarded in turn with an encore of the classic "My Funny Valentine," winning an even more enthusiastic ovation before giving their final bows.

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