Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

Watching and listening to Ute Lemper is to fall in love. She is the singer who captures in her voice and her acting all the best singers from the present and the past: Edith Piaf’s dramatic power, Lotte Lenya’s musicality, Marlene Dietrich’s magnetism, and Sarah Vaughan’s depth. Nevertheless, she is something more than all of them combined. Her fame and success originate from her undeniable artistic and performing stature, but also from her passionate commitment towards art, politics, history, and from her complex and polemic relationship with her native country, Germany. Ute Lemper cuts longitudinally through historical time - from German cabaret to contemporary North-American musical - languages – she sings in German, Hungarian, Yiddish, Arab, English and French – and cultures: she finds inspiration in Kurt Weill, in Brecht, as much as in Leo Ferré, Jacques Brel or Tom Waits.

Ute Lemper is not just to be listened to, but watched as well, since she composes each piece like a small theatre play – a play from this theatre of the absurd called life, with its opposing feelings, its conflicts, its joys, and its tragedies. She sings with the magnificent voice that God gave

her, and that she has nurtured with training; yet she also sings with her body, particularly with those lean, long arms, those refined, expressive hands that are the prolongation of her voice.

Each one of her shows is not a sequence of wonderfully executed songs; it is a genuine theatrical mise en scène, where delivery to the audience is not incompatible with a rigorous study of all kinds of effects. Any of her songs is a performance, with inspired “arrangements” that span from her prodigious high notes to those deep, guttural sounds, torn from the guts or from jazz. She said that what characterizes her is free music, the spirit of freedom that she found while living in New York – a European city, in her own words, where crossbreeding, eclecticism and experimentation are possible.

As we still remember her memorable performance during the second ÚNICAS festival, Ute Lemper returns, this time with a different show, a tribute to the masterpieces of French song - the most existentialist of popular musics - and to her own compositions. She is not going to sing Jacques Brel, nor Edith Piaf: she is going to recreate them, with her talent, her sophistication and her ability to move the audience.

CRISTINA PERI ROSSI
(Writer)

LINEUP:

Ute LEMPER, vocals
..........................................
Vana GIERIG, piano
..........................................
Todd TURKISHER, drums
..........................................
Don FALZONE, bass
..........................................
Mark LAMBERT, guitar