Ute Lemper Albums (13)
'Blood & Feathers: Live from the Café Carlyle'
Release Date 6/7/2005
Tracks 15
Label DRG
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What The Critics Say
Recorded in the Caryle Café in their historic and luxurious Caryle Hotel in Manhattan, German chanteuse Ute Lemper delves deeply into underbelly of popular song -- both American and European -- and transforms the stage into a place of mystery and imagination through the sheer power and fearlessness of her sophisticated delivery. While her studio recordings have long been renowned for the chances they take, it is here, in front of a live audience, that the modern-day cabaret diva slowly and fearlessly tears at the skin of song and reveals what lies underneath its often romantic and seemingly innocent veneer. Kicking off the show with Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's "Pirate Jenny," Lemper unveils her intent. This is a snarling, daring version with her quartet supporting her slippery delivery while simultaneously pushing her out onto the wire that evokes both the ghosts of the original protagonist and the emotional depth of Edith Piaf. Next Lemper touches upon melancholy, desperate love in "Milord" by Georges Moustaki. These tracks are merely preparations for what lies in the dark heart of the set, the "Moon Medley" that juxtaposes songs on both sides of the Atlantic that rip the false romanticism from their popular interpretations: "Bilbao Song," "Alabama Song" by Brecht and Weil, Van Morrison's "Moon Dance," Sting's "Moon Over Bourbon Street," Joni Mitchell's "Mon at the Window," Arlen, Rose and Harburg's "It's Only a Paper Moon," and Tom Waits' "Grapefruit Moon" taking it out, leaving the audience and listeners literally stunned at the way the layers of wistful dreamy ponderance on the mythical star are juxtaposed against more sinister and erotic things that happen under its ghostly glow. All the while, Lemper dialogues, quips, and commands the attention of her audience with canny revelations and edgy humor. The set comes full circle as Lemper launches into "Lili Marlene," "Muenchhausen/The Baron of Lies," a lengthy, revelatory read of Michel Emer's beautiful "Accordeoniste," and finally a twisted, hilarious medley of cabaret tunes, where, along with the show theme, "Mack the Knife" enters to bear his evil grin. By the time she is finished, the spell is complete, the crowd breathless yet nearly riotous, and Lemper has successfully transformed the space of performance into the baudy poetic terrain where broken dreams and those realized are one and the same. Wondrous. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
'But One Day...'
Release Date 11/19/2002
Tracks 27
Label Japanese Import
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What The Critics Say
Ute Lemper, who has devoted much of her recording career to resurrecting German interwar songs, particularly those of Kurt Weill, and who included such Weill successors as Nick Cave and Elvis Costello on her last album, The Punishing Kiss, here adds her own name to the songwriting credits while continuing to find ways to explore her favorite music. This is a collection of bleak songs, influenced, one can't help thinking, by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks this immigrant New Yorker mentions in her liner notes. (The album's photographs, meanwhile, are dominated by images of the Brooklyn Bridge, including one shot in which the World Trade Center is visible.) The tempos are slow, the arrangements lushly string-filled, and Lemper, a vocal chameleon, sings in a breathy, breaking voice, beginning with Weill's "September Song." Her own contributions, which can be termed "art songs" in the sense that they dispense with such conventions as choruses or easily hummed melodies, are full of images of despair expressed in a charmingly broken English. No matter how far afield she goes, Lemper is never much removed from Weimar Germany, as "Lena," a song about a haunted Holocaust descendent living in Mexico, shows. Her most conventional original song is the title track, a lovelorn lament. The songs of Jacques Brel and Astor Piazzolla are brought in to expand on the sense of anguish and depression, and at the end Lemper returns to an old favorite, Bertolt Brecht, for "Ballad of Marie Sanders, the Jew's Whore," in which a German woman is excoriated for associating with a Jew. Lemper then closes with her own reflection on Brecht, a comment equally applicable to the troubled world situation of 2002. But One Day... is an artist's telling reflection on her own heritage and her view of the post-9/11 climate. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Ute Lemper has developed a reputation as a successor to Lotte Lenya with the looks of Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich, a northern European chanteuse with a taste for the decadent sound of Weimar Germany; she is arguably the definitive interpreter of Kurt Weill for her generation. Punishing Kiss, her first album devoted primarily to songs by contemporary songwriters, extends her reputation by incorporating the work of artists influenced by Weill, including Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, and Nick Cave. But the primary collaborators on the album are the members of the British group the Divine Comedy, who provide the backing tracks on most of the songs, and three compositions by group members Neil Hannon and Joby Talbot, with Hannon singing duet vocals on three tracks. The sound of Weill -- the early Weill -- pervades the album, starting with the inclusion of his "Tango Ballad," a song in which a couple reminisce about the good old days when he was a procurer and she a prostitute. Such a decadent tone continues in Cave's "Little Water Song" (sung by a woman who is being drowned by her lover), Costello's complex tales of romantic dissolution, and in the characteristic Waits songs of romantic low-life types. Among the most impressive selections, however, are the Divine Comedy tracks "The Case Continues" and "Split," which finds Lemper and Hannon hurling witty insults at each other. From its extensive set of photographs of Lemper in black leather posing in a decaying building to the dramatic arrangements and the singer's powerful, precise vocals, this is highly stylized art music given a pop element by its composers. A daring effort, it deserves more of an audience than it is likely to get, at least at first. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
"Entartete Musik," of which 18 examples in English adaptation are provided here, includes, in the definition of producer Michael Haas, among other things, "important works lost, destroyed or banned by the political disruptions of the twentieth century," in particular, the Third Reich of Nazi Germany. Specifically, these are cabaret songs of the years of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), written by such composers as Friedrich Hollaender (who became Frederick Hollander when he followed Marlene Dietrich to Hollywood) and Mischa Spoliansky. They reflect the decadence and unfulfilled hopes of a temporary oasis in German history marked by runaway inflation and agitations of the Left and Right, matters treated in the lyrics. The album contains material that provides the perhaps unrealized source of later re-creations like the score for the Broadway musical Cabaret. Ute Lemper (who has performed extensively in that show) gives bravura readings of songs that treat corruption, homosexuality, and a doomed social idealism with music, provided by the Matrix Ensemble, that recalls Kurt Weill and hot jazz. The looming Nazi era is inescapable in such Hollaender songs as "Oh, How We Wish That We Were Kids Again" and especially "Münchhausen." The latter bears some similarity to the folk song "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream," except that we know what happened in Germany instead of the dream of peace and social justice Hollaender proposes. More than a mere history lesson, Berlin Cabaret Songs reawakens a lost era that engages issues of tolerance, sexual confusion, and political uncertainty that continue to affect listeners. It also contains some extremely funny numbers. Jeremy Lawrence's English lyrics, based on translations by Alan Lareau, Kathleen L. Komar, and Haas, are amazingly deft, retaining the German flavor but singing well in their adoptive language. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
'Sings Kurt Weill, Vol. 2'
Release Date 1/1/1993
Tracks 14
Label London
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'The Michael Nyman Songbook'
Release Date 1/1/1992
Tracks 12
Label London
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