31 Aug 13 - Ute Lemper

AUGUST 31-SEPTEMBER 1 2013
REBEL IN
A RED DRESS
CRAZY, HORNY, PASSIONATE: GERMAN CHANTEUSE
UTE LEMPER ON THE EVE OF HER AUSTRALIAN TOUR
TIM WINTON
TACKLES THE
CLASS DIVIDE
IN SHRINE
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I
08
AUGUST 31-SEPTEMBER 1, 2013 I
theaustralian.com.au/review
COVER STORY
Ute Lemper is set to tour
Australia with a bouquet of
Pablo Neruda’s love poems,
writes Jane Cornwell
LL angles, limbs and marcelwaved charisma, Ute Lemper
slinks across the back of the stage,
hiding her face with a bowler hat.
Her two musicians — a pianist on
a baby grand and a dark-haired man on
bandoneon concertina — play a little louder
over the applause.
‘‘Buonasera, Venice,’’ says the celebrated
German chanteuse, coming into the spotlight
to scat-sing her hello. ‘‘It is so wonderful to be
here in the City of Love . . . The smell, the feel
. . . I’ve fallen for a gondolier . . .’’
Under a gilt and sky-blue ceiling in the
Teatro La Fenice, an opera house held to be the
most beautiful in the world, a thousand pairs of
eyes fix on this woman with a method actor’s
stagecraft and an instrument for a voice. For
the next two hours, until her final encore and
standing ovation, no one looks anywhere else.
It takes an extraordinary artist to mesmerise
a capacity audience with little more than a
bowler hat, a red feather boa and a bunch of
great tunes. Lemper, 50, is up there with the
best. Billed as Ute Lemper Sings Brecht and
Weill, this opening concert at the 2013 Venice
Theatre Biennale was supposed to focus
exclusively on the lusty, anarchic repertoire
that Lemper has made her own: that of
German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht
and composer Kurt Weill, and the betweenthe-wars songs of the Weimar cabaret.
‘‘But I don’t like to be obedient,’’ says
Lemper, improvising a number on mouth
trumpet; reprising All That Jazz from her star
turn on Broadway in Chicago; dancing a tango
to the music of Argentinean icon Astor
Piazzolla, whose compositions — with lyrics by
Horacio Ferrer — she performed on her visit to
Australia in 2010.
She did Brecht and Weill then, too, along
with Marlene Dietrich, Edith Piaf and Belgian
chanson master Jacques Brel; here in Venice,
her heart-rending version of Brel’s Ne Me
Quitte Pas (Don’t Leave Me) brings the tissues
out on all five tiers.
Next month, Lemper is back in Australia for
a national tour with her new show, a song cycle
of 12 love poems by Nobel prize-winning
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. She’ll also be
cherry-picking from her much-loved cabaret
repertoire, inviting the ghosts of the great pre
and post-war singers to join her onstage.
‘‘The European songbook is at the core of
my art,’’ the Manhattan-based mother of four
tells me the afternoon of the concert, over
coffee in her hotel next to Venice’s bustling
Grand Canal. ‘‘My mission has always been to
keep [alive] the songs of these composers who
were exiled by the Nazis.’’
After 30 years as the leading global
ambassador for Weimar-era music — the
provocative songs sung underground in 1930s
Berlin and elsewhere — Lemper remains
passionate about the repertoire. ‘‘The Berlin
cabaret songs are such fun to do because they
are designed to tease the hell out of people,’’
she says in her mid-Atlantic twang, eyes
twinkling under Dietrich-esque brows.
And does Lemper know how to tease,
morphing onstage from vamp to coquette,
victim to Valkyrie, ice-maiden to clown, her
multilingual between-song patter connecting
the songs to the fear and chaos in contemporary culture, yanking them into the present.
‘‘And the moon looks down over Venice,
over Italy, crying,’’ she speak-sings during a
languorous German-language rendition of
Brecht-Weill’s The Bilbao Song. ‘‘Who is this
Berlusconi . . . What is this man still doing here
. . . What will happen to this place . . .?’’
The day before the concert, Italy’s former
prime minister Silvio Berlusconi broadcast an
angry television message protesting against his
©
LUCAS ALLEN
A
PASSIONS
AFLAME
IN SONG
conviction for tax fraud. ‘‘I can’t believe this
caricature of a man survives in political life,’’
Lemper says, shaking her head.
‘‘But he has a lot of followers. That’s the
thing with Italy . . .’’
She looks across the lagoon to the island of
San Giorgio Maggiore, where an 11m-tall
sculpture of a naked and pregnant woman,
created by British artist Marc Quinn, sits on a
piazza next to a church. A controversial feature
of this year’s Venice Art Biennale, its presence
has angered the city’s Catholic patriarchate.
‘‘The Catholic Church just creeps me out,’’
Lemper says. ‘‘All that history of oppression
and bloodshed, that secret manipulation of
political power.’’ A shudder. ‘‘I grew up
Catholic and the first thing I did when I was 18
was to sign the famous yellow paper you have
to sign in Germany to quit the church.’’
Her banker father and amateur opera-singer
mother were mortified, but hardly surprised:
as a teenager growing up in the conservative
provincial town of Muenster, their rebellious,
whip-smart only daughter was always giving
them grief. (‘‘Now I’ve given them four
grandchildren,’’ she grins, ‘‘so they’re
very happy.’’)
Between smoking dope, fronting a local
funk band and delving into her father’s
collection of American jazz — ‘‘everything
from Duke Ellington to the Brecker Brothers
and Chick Corea’’ — Lemper cast around for
answers to her questions about the Holocaust
and the war. Worryingly, no one seemed to
have any; worse, no one seemed to want to
have to think about it.
‘‘At the end of the war, most Germans were
more concerned about being attacked by the
Allies,’’ she says.
‘‘They were all running into their basements to hide from the planes. The second
generation just put it away and moved on to
the next chapter, which was about the end of
the Cold War and uncovering who had been
collaborating with the (East German) Stasi.’’
Lemper pauses, clutching at the gold heart
on the long gold chain around her neck — a
gift from her husband and musical collaborator
Todd Turkisher — and rearranges her long
legs. ‘‘So that deep, humane, philosophical
conversation about this unspeakable crime the
Germans created and executed never happened,’’ she continues. ‘‘This fuelled me with
such rage that I decided to become an artist, so
I could open a dialogue with the past.’’
Intrigued by the journey of Weill — initially
by his revolutionary German compositions and
collaborations with Brecht, a communist —
Lemper started performing his work in piano
bars, for friends. Songs such as Mackie Messer,
the chilling original version of Mack the Knife
from The Threepenny Opera, demanded to be
sung by an awakened spirit. Lemper delivered
them with the zeal of someone shouting about
the right to try to change society and the world.
Through ballet classes in Cologne and
drama school in Vienna; through her professional debut in Cats and starring roles as
Peter in Peter Pan, Sally Bowles in a Paris
production of Cabaret and a flame-haired,
strung-out Lola in The Blue Angel — her take on
Dietrich’s 1930 film role — Lemper kept the
Brecht-Weill songs close. They needed her, she
says, to sing them.
Her 1988 Decca recording Ute Lemper Sings
Kurt Weill initiated a revival of interest in the
‘‘degenerate music’’ banned by the Nazis and
the beauty of the stigmatised German language. Lemper’s international reputation grew
with follow-up albums embracing the melancholic music Weill wrote in exile in France and
the jazzy, more commercial material he
penned in the US.
She was already on a fast track to stardom
theaustralian.com.au/review I
AUGUST 31-SEPTEMBER 1, 2013 I
09
AFP
AFP
COVER STORY
Ute Lemper, facing page, above and below left, is best known for her rendition of the BrechtWeill songbook; she has been described as the spiritual heir of Marlene Dietrich, above right
LEMPER LIGHTS
UP WHEN SHE
TALKS ABOUT HER
LATEST VENTURE
when, in 1989, Dietrich called her up: ‘‘She’d
sent me a note of congratulation after I’d won
the Moliere Award [the French equivalent of a
Tony] for Sally Bowles in Paris, and I’d written
her a letter back. She found me in this little
hotel in Germany and we spoke for two hours.
‘‘I wish I could remember more of what we
talked about,’’ says Lemper, who has been
called Dietrich’s spiritual heir. ‘‘It was so long
ago. All I know is that — boom! — everything
just took off from there.’’
Lemper has gone on to write songs inspired
by Weill’s musical theatre; her 2000 album
Punishing Kiss featured material written for her
by Weill admirers such as Nick Cave, Elvis
Costello and Tom Waits.
Her recent Charles Bukowski venture — ‘‘a
very garage, jazz-influenced, open, theatrical
and dirty show’’ — seemed to position the
(German-born) American poet smack-bang in
underground Berlin.
She has her critics, of course. There are
those who complain that Lemper’s shows have
begun to feel weighed down by her Weimar
material; that her Germanic self-hatred is
neurotic; that her act has become mannered,
even cartoonish. All such complaints underestimate her commitment to the Jewish-
German dialogue and the material’s historic
context, and the ease with which she inhabits
her onstage archetypes. ‘‘My work is about the
magic of life and the burden of life,’’ she has
said. ‘‘It depends on whether you see the glass
half full or half empty.’’
If she found any medium cumbersome, it
was musicals: ‘‘My vision changes each time I
perform so I was always a little misplaced on
Broadway and in [London’s] West End. For six
shows a week I had to stay true to a certain
style of presentation, which really wasn’t me.’’
She rubs the back of her neck with fineboned fingers. ‘‘I have two herniated discs in
here from all the whiplash I gave myself
dancing in Chicago,’’ she says with a sigh.
For a while she required steroid injections
for a pinched sciatic nerve, the legacy of a fall
from a horse a few years ago. (She got right
back on again once she’d recovered.)
It’s these little aches and pains that remind
her that she’s getting older. Other than that
she feels — and looks — considerably younger.
‘‘Fifty! I can’t believe it! I feel 35!’’ She
shakes her head in disbelief.
‘‘I feel crazy, horny, passionate, in the
middle of f. . king life!’’
There certainly has been no stopping her. A
modern-day renaissance woman, Lemper has
worked with symphony orchestras, held exhibitions of her expressionist paintings, written
articles in journals and appeared in films for
directors such as Peter Greenaway and Robert
Altman — for the latter she strutted naked and
pregnant down a catwalk in Pret-a-Porter.
She’s just finished shooting a cameo in
Woody Allen’s latest, yet-to-be-named flick
(‘‘I’m a Berlin cabaret singer,’’ she says with a
comic roll of her eyes). Lemper used to be a
regular performer at the plush Cafe Carlyle in
Manhattan, where the veteran director, a keen
clarinetist, has a residency with his jazz band.
‘‘The audience was getting too Republican
for me,’’ says Lemper, who moved to New
York in 1997. ‘‘I’m much more comfortable
at Joe’s.’’
That’s Joe’s Pub on the Upper West Side, a
cosy venue around the corner from the
apartment Lemper shares with Turkisher, their
children Jonas, 2, and Julian, 7, and her
daughter Stella, 17, whose father is comedian
David Tabatsky (with whom Lemper also has a
19-year-old son, Max). She has a penthouse
workspace with a piano and a painter’s easel at
the top of her apartment block.
‘‘Joe’s Pub is where I try out all my new
projects,’’ she says. ‘‘I did the Neruda there
and it went so well I booked some concerts. It’s
brand-new; so far I’ve only performed it in
Verona in Italy and once at the Queen
Elizabeth Hall in London. I can’t wait to bring
it to Australia.’’
Lemper lights up when she talks about her
latest venture, which marries the intensely
rhythmic poetry of Neruda — among the
greatest and most prolific of 20th-century Latin
American poets — with music co-composed by
Lemper and bandoneon player Marcelo Nisinman, and played by a six-piece band.
She picks up the slim volume of Neruda
poems I’ve been swooning over by way
of research.
‘‘I found this little book by coincidence,’’
she says, flicking through it. ‘‘It was perfect:
simple poetry written from the heart. It
was about love and pain, joy and obsession.
Puedo escribir los versos mas tristes esta
noche . . .’’ She recites the opening sentence of
Neruda’s Poema 20. ‘‘Tonight I can write the
saddest lines.’’
The show features songs in Spanish, French
and English.
‘‘It is one of the most beautiful things I’ve
ever done,’’ she says.
It also seems the most random — a German
artist taking on a South American folk hero?
Although she had nailed the elegant nuevo
tango repertoire of Piazzolla, which she toured
with the latter’s original sextet and with
Nisinman throughout Europe in 2011, this was
different. She was creating music from scratch.
‘‘I’d done the Bukowski show so I knew that
I could crawl into poetry and make music
around it,’’ she says. ‘‘I also knew how much I
loved the bandoneon, which is an instrument
of tango, but so haunting and textured and
colourful, it is like a voice itself.’’
That night, onstage at the Teatro La Fenice,
Lemper tells a funny story about the bandoneon’s invention in Germany and the mix-up
with the accordion that saw it being shipped
down to Argentina. All while prowling the
stage, sitting back-to-back with her pianist and
draping her boa around bandoneon player
Victor Villena.
Then she launches into Ne Me Quitte Pas and
soon everyone is bawling their eyes out.
Ute Lemper performs at the Brisbane Concert
Hall as part of the Brisbane Festival on
September 13, then tours to Perth, Melbourne,
Adelaide and Sydney.
State Theatre Company and Adina Apartment
Hotels in association with Arts Projects
Australia and Adelaide Festival
Centre present the Kneehigh production
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by noël coward
Adapted and directed by Emma Rice
10 - 28 september
BASS 131 246
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