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Publication: HOMBURG1
By: Stephan Bonaventura
Date: 8. September 2024


Foto: Stephan Bonaventura

Es gibt Abende, die bleiben hängen. Nicht, weil sie laut oder spektakulär sind, sondern weil sie tief berühren. Der Auftritt von Ute Lemper bei der diesjährigen HomBuch im Homburger Kulturzentrum Saalbau war genau so ein Abend.

Vor einem fast vollbesetzten Saal nahm die Ausnahmekünstlerin das Publikum mit auf eine intime Zeitreise durch ihr Leben, ihre Musik und ihre Erinnerungen. „Ich werde euch mitnehmen auf eine Reise durch mein Leben, Erinnerungen, eine Retrospektive“, hatte Lemper im Vorfeld versprochen – und genau das tat sie, auf eine Art, die tief bewegte.

Die Bühne im Saalbau war schlicht und elegant gehalten. Im Mittelpunkt stand Lemper, begleitet von ihrem Trio aus Pianist, Kontrabassist und Schlagzeuger. Es war eine Inszenierung ohne großen Pomp, die den Fokus auf die Musik und die Geschichten legte, die Ute Lemper zu erzählen hatte. Ihr schwarzes Kleid und die meist warme, gezielte Beleuchtung verstärkten die intime Atmosphäre, während die Musik und ihre Erzählungen das Homburger Publikum direkt ins Herz trafen. Der Applaus sprach für sich.


Foto: Stephan Bonaventura

Im Zentrum des Abends stand ihr aktuelles Album Time Traveler, das Lemper als sehr persönliches Werk beschreibt. Es vereint Songs, die sich über einen Zeitraum von mehr als zwei Jahrzehnten erstrecken, ohne dass diese zeitliche Distanz spürbar wird. „Die Gegenwart in der Vergangenheit und die Vergangenheit in der Gegenwart gehen eine Osmose ein“, heißt es in der offiziellen Beschreibung des Albums, und genau das spiegelte der Abend wider. Die musikalischen Genres vermischten sich mühelos – mal klangen Jazz, dann wieder Chanson, Pop oder Soul durch. Es war ein breites Spektrum, das Lemper mit voller Leidenschaft präsentierte, inspiriert von Künstlern wie Joni Mitchell, John Legend, Erykah Badu und Annie Lennox.


Foto: Stephan Bonaventura

Dabei ging es Lemper nicht darum, Erwartungen zu erfüllen. Sie präsentierte ihre Lieblingslieder und eigene Kompositionen mit einer solchen Authentizität, dass sich kein Augenblick erzwungen anfühlte. Stattdessen war es eine stetige und aus der tiefsten Seele kommende künstlerische Befreiung, die das Publikum spürte.

Neben der Musik gab es auch poetische und nachdenkliche Momente, in denen Lemper aus ihrer Autobiografie “Die Zeitreisende” vorlas. Sie sprach über prägende Erlebnisse, die sie zum Lachen und Weinen brachten, und teilte diese mit einer solchen Offenheit, dass der Saal merklich auf ihre Worte reagierte. Homburg erfuhr eine Atmosphäre, die sowohl melancholisch als auch hoffnungsvoll war.


Foto: Stephan Bonaventura

Als der Abend endete, war es nicht nur die Musik, die nachhallte, sondern es waren auch die persönlichen Einblicke, die Lemper ihrem dankbaren Publikum gewährt hatte. Viele der Anwesenden verließen den Saal sicherlich mit dem Gefühl, nicht nur einen einzigartigen musikalischen Abend erlebt zu haben, sondern auch einen Menschen ein wenig besser kennengelernt zu haben, der auf den Bühnen dieser Welt zu Hause ist. Glamour-Feeling in Homburg, auch das schafft das Lesefest HomBuch in faszinierender Art und Weise.

Fotos: Stephan Bonaventura

Click here to read the article in the original Publication

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Publication: Record Collector Magazine
By: Paul Davies
Date: 27/4/24

Review of Time Traveler – A Retrospective of Ute’s Life and Music
London, St Martin’s In The Field Church

A bewitching artiste with spellbinding stagecraft, Lemper confirmed her star status in autobiographical storytelling encompassing the arc of her storied career.

Sharing personal Marlene Dietrich anecdotes and recounting the toll that Chicago took, her tales were punctuated by piano and double-bass on sophisticated jazz from the Weimar Republic to the West End, plus her current Time Traveller. Oozing sassy star quality and class, she commanded the venue with her startling vocal range, passionate delivery and magnetic presence, saluting her ecstatic fans on exiting to fervent applause.

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Publication: thelatest.co.uk
By: Andrew Kay
Date: April 26, 2024

To witness the brilliance of perhaps the greatest living chanteuse in the world in the intimate surroundings of The Old Market in Hove will remain one of my most cherished experiences of all time. First aware of her work back in my early twenties when I was fascinated by the arts of the Weimar Republic and in particular Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, I came across her voice on CDs. Little did I know that her early recordings of those songs would spark wider public interest in them, but I was soon to find out far more about how those recordings and her career.

The Time Traveller is far more than a simple concert, it is a theatrical journey, Lemper’s life in both theatre and in song, and it is a lavish tale told with passion and with skill. Her early life, her home life, her student days and her travels.Travel is the key that the evening is sung in, looking down, with some disdain, from her seat in economy, at the waves in the ocean below and comparing them to the wrinkles on the back of her hands, she is constantly on the move, from ancient Europe to new Europe and modern Europe before finally returning to her adopted Manhattan home.

The journey take in her time in Paris playing Peter Pan and the joy of flying on stage, then Sally Bowles in Cabaret, a role she does not dwell on or sing more than a few bars of. Then on to being cast as Velma Kelly in Kander and Ebb’s brilliant Chicago. Here she does pause and sing, and tells how the rigours of Bob Fosse’s choreography have impacted on her physical well-being. Lemper can deliver humour with a wry smile and do it well.

There’s a fabulous section devoted to Weill and Brecht and to my total joy a long passage from Die Dreigroschenoper, where she slides from English to guttural German with great dramatic effect. And drama is the second key in which she delivers the evening, she is without doubt a great actress.

A passage dedicated to a previous show, Rendezvous With Marlene, is both fascinating and hilarious, a conversation, three hours by telephone with Dietrich is recounted, in short, and to great effect. And with equal openness she talks of her failed relationship with her mother and about her own attitude to motherhood and her much loved family.

She is also a woman fired by passion and politics, stories of feeling isolated while living in West Berlin and of course her work in creating songs from the poetry of concentration camp victims and survivors. The songs she delivers from her Songs For Eternity project are deeply moving but equally so are her more contemporary compositions from her new album. And in researching her life and work there are few composers she has not worked with or sung, it is a catalogue so catholic in it’s breadth that it is hard to imaging how she has fitted it all in, but she has, clearly a very dedicated performer.

So finally on to the voice, yes a long time in coming but so much more to this woman than simply song. The voice is extraordinary, the range vast, the tone even wider, slipping with ease from gentle and soothing, sweet even, to rasping and filled with anger and perhaps venom. There is abundant evidence of the classical but it is interlaced with jazz. Few singers can really deliver that scat phenomenon, but Ute scatters the stage with notes, soaring riffs and scales, blasts of horns, searing trills, it’s a universe of sound but one that never ever loses touch with the original melody, the heart of a song.

Lemper is accompanied throughout by the brilliant pianist Vana Gierig and bassist Giuseppe Bassi who not only deliver the songs but delicately colour the narrative.

I was lucky enough to see her play Velma Kelly in the West End, but luckier still to have now seen and heard the true expanse of this sensational woman’s talent.

Andrew Kay

The Old Market
26 April

Rating:

Click here to read the review on The Latest.

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Publication: The Guardian
By: Rian Evans
Date: 25 April, 2024

Theatricality and chemistry … Ute Lemper. Photograph: Sonja Horsman
Theatricality and chemistry … Ute Lemper. Photograph: Sonja Horsman


St George’s Bristol
The German chanteuse enters her seventh decade with her velvet voice and characteristic wit intact

Time Traveler is the title of the indefatigable Ute Lemper’s current short UK tour and also that of the new album of songs she herself has written. Lemper is mostly labelled a chanteuse, but she has always been multifaceted: singer, actor, dancer – for whom Maurice Béjart choreographed a ballet – an exhibited painter in her native Germany, cabaret artist, and now composer, too.

Seemingly prompted by a “big birthday” – her 60th – last year, a period of musing on life, loves, hopes and glories, was set in train. Songs emerged naturally, reflected particularly in the title song Time Traveler and also At the Reservoir, a favourite place in New York, long since her home. Yet Lemper also pointedly invoked Germany’s history; a potent moment came when listing the iniquities of 1924 Weimar – with whose music Lemper is particularly associated – and the suggestion that, a century on, things are actually still the same. Reaching the final line of Pete Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone? there was real anguish: When will they ever learn? Lemper whispers: “Never!”

Implicit theatricality: Ute Lemper in her dressing room at St George's in Bristol. Photograph: Sonja Horsman
Implicit theatricality: Ute Lemper in her dressing room at St George’s in Bristol. Photograph: Sonja Horsman

Singing in different languages – English words sometimes an indecipherable drawl, the German carrying the frisson of authenticity – Lemper delivered her best-known numbers – the Weill/Brecht Surabaya-Johnny and Edith Piaf’s La Vie en Rose – with her characteristic mix of sleek slinkiness of voice, velvety in the lower range. With self-deprecation rather than self pity, she wittily made All That Jazz and the whiplash factor of Velma Kelly’s dancing in Chicago (whom she played in both London and New York) the long legacy of back problems, and displayed another extraordinary facet of her artistry, voicing the sound of a muted trumpet.

In between the songs was intimate, breathy and confessional soliloquising. The story of how Marlene Dietrich, on learning that Lemper was being labelled “la nouvelle Marlene”, phoned the then 24-year-old to talk, was mesmerising.

Lemper’s implicit theatricality was matched by chemistry with her musicians – brilliant pianist Vana Gierig and bassist Giuseppe Bassi. She may channel the likes of Dietrich and Piaf, with a strong sense of Jean Ross (on whom Christopher Isherwood based Sally Bowles), but Lemper is still very much her own woman.