Ute Lemper chante Kurt Weill

Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill (1992) was directed by Jean-Pierre Barizien. The film depicts a live performance by Ute Lemper at a Paris cabaret, "Les Bouffes du Nord." Jeff Cohen is at the piano as her accompanist.

Lemper has a great voice and a very attractive stage presence. She's German, but she appears to be fluent in English and--apparently--French. She looks and acts as if she were born to sing Bertolt Brecht lyrics and Kurt Weill's music.

Every chanteuse wants to put her own stamp on the songs she sings, and Lemper is no exception. However, as an earlier reviewer noted, sometimes she puts too much of her stamp on the songs. This is especially true in the great song "I'm a Stranger Here Myself." She whispers, she shouts, and, along the way, loses the sense of the song.

It's interesting to me that YouTube has a version of Lemper performing the same song with an orchestra, in which she sings it in a less mannered, more realistic manner, and it's great. (I think the definitive version is that by Teresa Stratas. However, she was an opera singer, not a chanteuse, so her version relies on her high, high soprano.)

This is a DVD worth seeing if you're an Ute Lemper fan, or a Kurt Weill fan. I enjoyed it, but I'm both a Lemper and a Weill fan. If you're neither, it might not work for you.

This movie carries an impossibly high IMDb rating of 8.7. However, only 38 people rated it. Apparently, all of them love Lemper and Weill. My rating (number 39) was an 8.0.

Ute Lemper has a good voice, an impressive command of diction (when she isn't coyly whispering the words.) and languages and is a very attractive performer. But why does she insist on imposing her cutesy mannerisms to the extent that there is no "line" left in the vocalism? To me, the songs of Kurt Weill don't need the kind of "help" she gives them and I think that Lotte Lenya with very little voice and a not awfully attractive appearance is much better on a video or low fidelity recording than Ms. Lemper with all the staging, the shtick and the peculiar arrangements.

I didn't see much of the Nyman section but it looked as though she was a lot less mannered in it than in the Weill.

Stick with Lotte, Teresa Stratas or even Walter Huston who was much more straightforward in the September Song.

An additional comment (June 2005): I heard a CD of Weill's Three-Penny Opera with Ms. Lemper which I think is much earlier and I was struck how straightforward it was all-around. I also heard that she has again reverted somewhat to her original style since this DVD but haven't heard any of her recent performances.