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Now it’s her day
Chanteuse Ute Lemper comes to Berklee



Ute Lemper is best known for her sly and often Marlene Dietrich–esque renditions of cabaret songs by Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and other Weimar-era composers. But she’s just as versed in the French chansons of Jacques Brel, and Stephen Sondheim’s standards for the stage. Now, after years of interpreting others’ works, the German-born chanteuse says penning her own songs " is a natural thing in my artistic evolution. " Five are featured on her latest album, But One Day, which she is " exploring " on the tour that will pass through the Berklee Performance Center next Saturday.

Lemper’s originals were inspired by her previous album, Punishing Kiss, which featured morsels written for her by Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, and other troubadours whose music is haunted by echoes of smoky Old World bar rooms. " After that experience, " she explains over the phone from her Manhattan apartment, " it was very natural to say, ‘This is it.’ I’m so contemporary with these guys who wrote for me, with the contact to these great offbeat-rocker guys. All of them were very inspired by Brecht and Weill, I’m sure. There’s a piece of Berlin in every of them. In Tom Waits’s stories, there’s a piece of Threepenny Opera, of the bars. It’s never romantic, it’s never glamorous. There’s always an anti-hero. What is glamorous is the outrageous crime in there or the outcast or the person who is spit out by society and left in the dark. It’s always the last guy in the bar who’s made the hero. "

Kiss released her from the classical section’s highbrow clutches, leaving her free to rove the expansive landscape of the pop sector. But she brings a Brechtian grit and a sophisticated intensity with her wherever she goes. On this tour she forays into Argentine tango (songs of which appear on One Day) and trance-tinged Middle Eastern music, which she’s studying for a show she’s doing next year in Paris called Nomad. She also saunters down the folksy path forged by Joni Mitchell, for whom she performed in a tribute concert last month.

And then there’s the avenue of her own originals. " I’m inspired by everything I’ve ever sang, everything I’ve ever represented in the world of theatrical music to date, so there’s a little piece of Berlin in me in everything I do, even if it’s a French chanson, a jazz song or a Brazilian song. In my own storytelling, I’m definitely inspired by all of that, but on a different level. In my stories, I don’t think about interpretation. I’m much more conceptually interested. It’s more about the musical vision, because then I get really involved as a composer with the landscape of the music, with the dramatic ride through the song: the crescendos, the powerful moments, and the pianissimo introverted moments. "

But Lemper’s repertoire has always been heavy on narrative songs that she calls " transparent, " or ripe for interpretation. Although she got her professional start in musicals and has most recently appeared as Velma Kelly in Chicago on Broadway and in the West End, she says she’s far more gratified doing concerts and coasting the wave of improv — zinging up a song with lick of sadistic vampiness here, a drizzle of aloof crooning there — than working on what she calls the " conveyer belt " of musical theater. " The Weimar repertoire has the political satire, which is made for provocation and lots of audience contact and involvement. But I don’t even necessarily need to go into the satirical aspects all the time. I just guide the audience with me on a journey through different cultures, different histories, different stories, and of all the stories that are kind of born in chaos. It goes down to the most essential parts of literature and human expression in art. "

Ute Lemper appears at Berklee Performance Center, 136 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, next Saturday, April 26, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $37; call (617) 876-4275.

Issue Date: April 17 - 24, 2003
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