Ute Lemper with Orpheus
Ute Lemper was the featured artist at last night's second Carnegie Hall concert of the Orpheus season. In the program, she was identified not as a soprano or as a mezzo or as an alto, although she is all of these, more or less, but as a "vocalist." Her performance took us about as far from its stylistic core as a "classical" concert can go without resorting to synthesizers and electric guitars. That's not to say that it belonged at Radio City; Ms Lemper's material was far too sophisticated for that venue. But her delivery was unmistakably pop. In the wilfully strident upper register of her voice, she outbelts even Patti LuPone. She drapes her femme-fatale figure in dresses that, in context, are quite provocative, she sings perched on very high heels, and she wields her mike like someone who was born on a television special. She even does a little shimmying. Meanwhile, despite big, elaborate orchestrations that bring Claus Ogerman and Vince Mendoza to mind, Orpheus almost gets lost in the background. Ute Lemper turns "concerts" into "events." All that was missing was jazzed-up lighting.
Ms Lemper gathered her material under the rubric, "Poets and Provocateurs." There were three Kurt Weill numbers, including, as an encore, "Surabaya Johnny," two songs by Jacques Brel, "Ne me quitte pas" and "Amsterdam", and two songs by Hanns Eisler, "Die Graben" and "The Waterwheel." Two songs came from the Piaf songbook, the very arty "Padam" (Norbert Glanzberg) and that rousing chestnut, "Milord" (Marguerite Monnot). There were two songs by Ms Lemper herself - in my view, the weakest items in her program, but then I'm not fond of Stephen Sondheim, from whom she appears to draw inspiration. The second of these numbers, "September Mourn," a "love-song" written to New York in the wake of 9/11, made me fidgety; the song never rose to the distinction required by that terrible wound. What I did really love were the two pieces that opened the second half of the concert, a tender Yiddish song by Chava Alberstein, "Bokserboym," and a conjunction of Amina Alaoi's "La Qad Kountou" and Nachoum Heimann's "Tzemach Bar." In the Alaoi song, Ms Lemper seemed to lose herself in the manner of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; the trance was quietly hair-raising. (I apologize for omitting the names of the many lyricists.)
The burden of all these songs is cosmopolitan, and they reminded us that people who get around as much as Ute Lemper does are fervent believers in tolerance and peace. There was an unmistakable whiff of the Cold War in her performance, which only makes sense in a child of divided Berlin, but it did not, I'm unhappy to see, feel dated. The Cold War was fought by enemies who, for the most part, declined to get to know much about each other; today's pro-war Americans share with Islamic "fanatics" and "insurgents" the belief that passports are unnecessary and possibly undesirable. Ms Lemper demonstrates that the anti-war anger of the Sixties is alive and well; it just dresses much better.
Orpheus did have the stage to itself at the beginning and then at the end. Framing Ms Lemper's suite of songs were Ervin Schulhoff's Suite for Chamber Orchestra and Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 2. The Schulhoff is delightfully naive take on the American popular dances that puzzled and intrigued Europe between the wars; with its klaxon and its xylophone, its "Tango" that is not a tango and its jazz-free "Jazz," the music conjures up the image of a disapproving Margaret Dumont, apoplectic in pearls. The Schoenberg Chamber Symphony, while notionally tonal, occupies a frontier well beyond that of Gurre-Lieder, and is so heavy with musical frustration that its easy, in hindsight, to see the composer's radical break with traditional tonality as inevitable. The only alternative must have been suicide.
Both orchestral pieces provoked a measure of class warfare. between Orpheus's downtown fans up in the balonies, and veteran old farts like me in the parquet and boxes. We were shshed and hissed at in our youth until it was drummed into us that applause is inappropriate before the entirety of a multi-movement work has been performed. No matter how brilliant the cadenza at the end of a concerto's opening allegro, the audience is to sit perfectly still while the orchestra and the soloist prepare for the melting slow movement. Observance of this rule has been wavering at New York concerts for some time now, and if last night was a reliable indicator, the ban on inter-movement applause is not long for this world.
