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UTE LEMPER
NIGHT CREATURE


Saturday afternoon, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performed a piece at the Wang Theatre inspired by something Duke Ellington once said: " Night creatures, unlike stars, do not come out at night — they come on, each thinking that before the night is out he or she will be the star. " That evening, such a species of night creature emerged at Berklee Performance Center. Singer Ute Lemper delivered up a simmering two-hour set, and long before it was over and the night was out, she’d become the focus of much stargazing. In tones that ranged from the sinister to the sweet, the seductive to the sentimental, the German-born chanteuse globetrotted through Buenos Aires, Paris, the Russian tundra, Belgium, and, of course, Berlin. Well-appointed to play guide to the " soul songs of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe, " she introduced the evening with a coy prelude that warned, " It’s quite a journey from east to west, north to south. There are sleepless nights all over the cities, restless nights, nights of poetry, fear, hope, passion, life, and death, waiting for dawn that will never break. " Then she broke into the first restless night, a sultry spin into Astor Piazzolla’s ominous tango ballad " Buenos Aires. "

Lemper is touring with a four-piece band to promote her new But One Day . . . (Decca), which includes several compositions she penned herself, a first in her long career of performing and recording saucy renditions of works by politically minded songwriters as assorted as Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, Stephen Sondheim, Jacques Brel, and, on her previous album, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and Elvis Costello. Some of her live performances had even more maudlin overtones than the album recordings. But the Berklee show was an occasion for her to sling the spikes she handles most expertly: French chansons and the cabaret songs of Weimar-era Germany.

The evening became a tour of time as well as place as she evoked the decadent whiskey-drenched underworlds of Berlin with a vampy twirl of a feathery boa, witty anecdotes, and, as in the intimate, gritty clubs of the Old World bourgeois, sarcastic flirtations with audience members she singled out as " victims. " A ravishing rendition of " Ne me quitte pas " was delivered with Mark Lambert plucking out a few accompanying notes on guitar as Lemper woefully crooned with a voice that sounded like crystal on the verge of shattering. She donned a bowler hat and trenchcoat, bringing to mind Liza Minnelli in Cabaret and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, for " Mack the Knife " (originally " Die Moritat von Mackie Messer, " from Die Dreigroschenoper), which blew in on fiery gusts of carnival-like fanfare drizzled with honky-tonk piano riffs. " Alabama Song " was tinged with chilling ferociousness until it broke into a blitz of rock, with Lambert even throwing in a little wah-wah for good measure.

Lemper never hesitated to thrust herself into the tragic core of every song and poke at it with the sharp edges of her voice. With more than a few musings on greed, corruption, crime, and other international pastimes, her chatty interludes had blaring resonance for our scandal- and war-saturated times. As for " Ballad of Marie Sanders, " it was written by Brecht and Hanns Eisler on the verge of World War II, and it speaks of the throngs who " crouch in their tenements and hear the beating of drums. " Lemper ripped into the song, and it wasn’t hard to detect that the commentary about more recent incursions was what made people cower.

BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Issue Date: May 2 - 8, 2003
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