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“The film based on my concert SONGS FOR ETERNITY is now available. It is a very poetic  and heartbreaking film illustrating the music in the ghettos. The concert was filmed in my hometown Muenster. I conceived this project to remind people not to forget. Please watch it.  – Ute”

In Songs for Eternity, Ute Lemper revives songs by Jewish composers that were written in the concentration camps of the Second World War and given to her in a songbook by her agent Orly Beigel.

The moving concert film accompanies the two on their journey to Bergen-Belsen, where Orly’s mother was imprisoned and eventually liberated by the US army. Ute Lemper sensitively and profoundly traces the emotional world of the Jewish composers and gives a touching musical memorial to their past.

This release will be available for purchase on September 20, 2024.

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Publication: artsreviewsedinburgh.com
By: Tom King
Date: August 2024

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Ute Lemper – Rendezvous With Marlene at the Queen’s Hall tonight was a one-night only show that, as you will have guessed from the title, was about one woman, the iconic Marlene Dietrich.

This production is based on a phone call between Dietrich and Ute Lemper in 1988 just after the papers announced that Ute Lemper was “The New Dietrich” and Ute had written a letter to Marlene apologising for the comparison between the two of them. The call (originally missed by Ute) was initially going to be a short one and ended up lasting some 3 hours as Marlene Dietrich surprisingly opened up about her life and her many lost loves.

It took Ute Lemper some 30 years to take up Marlene’s offer to tell her story, and I first saw this show in 2020. Tonight, I realised that last time around I had overlooked so many little moments in this story as we follow Marlene’s public and private life from making “The Blue Angel” in Germany then leaving the country of her birth to find international movie stardom in Hollywood, her hatred for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, through to the final years of her life, alone with only her old memories (and a lot of champagne) in an apartment in Paris.

We start this show with Ute Lemper taking that unexpected phone call from Marlene, then very quickly it is Ute that is on the end of the telephone and Marlene that is on stage telling her story, and what a story it is.  Here was a woman decades ahead of her time in how she dressed, how she spoke, and her openness about her marriage and her many lovers, both men and women.

Ute Lemper is without doubt the cabaret star of her generation, and clearly understands the power of cabaret, the power of words and songs, and the very power of the cabaret of the Weimar Republic that Marlene Dietrich emerged from.

This story also features some of the songs made famous by Marlene Dietrich. Some you would expect to be here – “Lili Marlene” and ““Falling In Love Again”, but there were a few surprises too. Amongst these surprises were powerful interpretations of “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” (Pete Seeger), “La Vie en Rose” (Edith Piaf) and “Ne me quitte pas” (Jacques Brel). Like all of the music in this show, these songs were carefully chosen to have real meaning at the right moment in Marlene Dietrich’s story, with everything enhanced by the careful selection of archive films projected behind Ute Lemper on stage.

Whether it be in words or song, Ute Lemper knows how to put emotion into them, and with a whisper can achieve more than many other contemporary performers can achieve shouting loudly. This show was just a perfect example of how a cabaret artist at the peak of their powers can spellbind an audience with words and music, leaving a room silent, everyone waiting for her next word to be spoken.

Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com

Click here to read the review on artsreviewsedinburgh.com.

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Ute Lemper – Berliner Lichter

WDR Funkhausorchester Video
02.07.2024
01:46:13 Std.
Verfügbar bis 30.12.2099
WDR 3

Das Konzert “Berliner Lichter” mit Solistin Ute Lemper und dem WDR Funkhausorchester unter der Leitung von Enrico Delamboye. Live aufgenommen am 03.05.2024 im WDR Funkhaus Wallrafplatz.

The concert “Berliner Lichter” with soloist Ute Lemper and the WDR Funkhausorchester under the direction of Enrico Delamboye. Recorded live on May 3rd, 2024 at the WDR Funkhaus Wallrafplatz.

Click here to view the video online.

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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 : VENTS
Date : Tuesday, May 28, 2024

It might seem funny to liken an undisputed legend to an incendiary artist breaking into the business of making records. But even among the greats of international song and theater, Ute Lemper is an unusual figure. She’s never played by anyone’s rules but hers — and Time Traveler, her 2023 full-length, feels like the work of an artist just getting started. Here is a rare thing: a set aesthetically hungry, experimental, confessional, genre-defiant, and brave. Longtime fans and newcomers counted it among the best of the year.

As incredible as it may seem about a musician who has accomplished so much, maybe Ute Lemper is entering her prime. Time Traveler demonstrates that she knows exactly how to get a recording work, how hard and far to push, how daring to be, and how best to apply the lessons of a lifetime in music to the task of making a song sound simultaneously contemporary and timeless. She can make sophisticated jazz feel approachable, she can make pop feel grown-up, and she can impart a delicious undercurrent of tension and intrigue to the most beautiful ballad. Most of all, she knows how to tell a story — and brings it to life.

So much we might expect from the award-winning singer and actress, her high profile and more experimental projects such as collaborations with Roger Waters on The Wall, Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, and other rock auteurs who admired her work as an imaginative interpreter. Yet the startling thing about Ute Lemper is her unquenchable ambition. Less than a year after astonishing listeners with Time Traveler, she’s back with a deluxe edition of the set that appends some of the most adventurous music she’s ever recorded to its running order. “Permanently Confused” is one of those tracks, and in its absolute candor, passion, and its intelligence, it’s both an extension and refinement of the experiments that made Time Traveler an irresistible proposition.