Music Review: Ute Lemper and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 24 March 2011 10:00

Written by Jack Angstreich

Ute Lemper Performs the Music of Kurt Weill
Featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis
Vibraphonist Warren Wolf,
Music Director Ted Nash

Ute Lemper brought her avant garde, "mannerist", Weimar-era stylings to an arresting, mostly chronological tour through the career of the great composer Kurt Weill in exciting jazz orchestrations, on the evening of Thursday, March 3, 2011 -- the first of three dates -- at the Rose Theater of Lincoln Center, joining eminent bandleader and jazz trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis, and his spectacular Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. At age 47, Lemper seems to have lost none of her vocal power or purity of tone.

The first half of the program surveyed the Weimar era and Lemper opened with "Alabama Song" -- popularized by The Doors -- from the relatively unsung Bertolt Brecht collaboration, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, the instigation for one of the playwright's most important theoretical writings as well as the basis for a legendary unfinished film by the master-animator Harry Smith. This number featured a superb trumpet solo by Marsalis.

Lemper commented that while Weill was probably observing from Heaven, his wife and muse, Lotte Lenya, was most likely watching from Hell, "drinking her whiskey and smoking her pipe".

The historical sequence proper began with the "Kanonen Song" and "Pirate Jenny" from the most famous Brecht-Weill collaboration, Threepenny Opera. Lemper jokingly remarked that the hard-core Marxist Brecht only shared 30% of the royalties with the composer.

Weill's less well-known collaboration with the German Expressionist dramatist Georg Kaiser, Silbersee, was featured with "Lotterieagents Tango", sung in German. Then Lemper performed "Surabaya Johnny" from the final Brecht-Weill Brecht collaboration, Happy End.

She closed the first half of the program with three songs from Weill's relatively unknown French musical, Marie Galante: "Le Grand Lustucru", "Youkali" -- sung in French and the highlight of the sequence and of this part of the evening -- and, finally, "J'Attends un Navire".

The second half surveyed Weill's extraordinary American career, opening with "My Ship" from the composer's interesting collaboration with the great lyricist Ira Gershwin, Lady in the Dark, a musical about psychoanalysis later filmed by Mitchell Leisen with Ginger Rogers.

She then beautifully sang the magnificent "September Song" -- one of Weill's best -- made famous by Walter Huston, in the composer's first collaboration with playwright Maxwell Anderson, Knickerbocker Holiday, here presented in an unusual arrangement which relied musically upon the gorgeous Gymnopedies by Erik Satie.

Lemper then performed "The Saga of Jenny", one of the best songs from Lady in the Dark, memorably sung by Julie Andrews in Robert Wise's undervalued musical, Star! Weill's collaboration with S. J. Perelman and Ogden Nash, One Touch of Venus -- later filmed with Ava Gardner -- was represented by the lovely "Speak Low" and this number proved to be one of the highlights of the evening.

The composer's late collaboration with celebrated lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, Love Life, was then featured with "This is the Life". Lemper concluded the evening with a showstopping rendition of "Mack the Knife", which she sang in both German and English.

Ute Lemper - Jazz at Lincoln Center
March 3 - 5, 2011

Rose Theater at Lincoln Center
33 West 60th Street
New York, New York 10023
212-258-800
www.jalc.org
Opens March 3, 2011; closes March 5, 2011