Latest news with #KurtWeill
Channel 4
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Channel 4
‘Art is nowadays completely commercial'
She was the star of the original Paris production of Cabaret, winning an Olivier Award for her Broadway role in Chicago. German singer Ute Lemper, whose family was divided by the Berlin Wall, performed alongside Pink Floyd to mark its collapse. Her career has been defined by her love of the music of the Weimar-era, and the composer Kurt Weill. 125 years after his birth, she's released a new album adapting his music for the modern age – and she'll perform it at Cadogan Hall in London next weekend.
New York Times
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Ute Lemper Still Sings Songs of Rebellion. The Stakes Are Still High.
'Welcome to Weimar — to the year 2025,' Ute Lemper announced. The German-born singer and actress was greeting friends and colleagues who had squeezed into the Birdsong Society's small headquarters by Gramercy Park to hear her perform songs from her latest album, which celebrates Kurt Weill, a composer Lemper has championed for four decades. Sliding into the album's title number, 'Pirate Jenny,' Lemper got even closer to a listener who had been standing just a few feet away, fixing him with a snarling grin. Featured in 'The Threepenny Opera,' the most celebrated of Weill's noted collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the tune has been covered by artists from Nina Simone to Judy Collins. It's also the only standard written from the perspective of a hotel maid waiting for a ship of pirates to arrive and, at her behest, murder all the guests. 'It's a song about revolution and rebellion,' Lemper explained in an interview before the event. The singer is less intimidating in conversation than she is when channeling bloodlust. She'll turn 62 in July, and with her long, lean frame and impossibly high cheekbones, she still projects the cool beauty of a runway model. Lemper was perceived as something of a rebel herself, at least in her native country, when Decca Records released 'Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill' in 1988. The album, which evolved from 'a little fringe record I made in Berlin' a couple of years earlier, earned Lemper an international fan base — with one notable exception. 'The Germans hated it,' Lemper recalled. 'They weren't interested in speaking about the past.' Decca's chief executive at the time, Roland Kommerell, German himself, had started a project dedicated to bringing back music that had been banned under the Nazis, including classical symphonies and Weimar-era cabaret songs — music composed by Jews who were persecuted or, like Weill, forced into exile. 'It was a huge chapter to rip open; it was still bleeding at the time,' Lemper said. 'And suddenly, I was in the position to have to respond to hundreds of journalists about this music. I became almost the representative of my generation, the Cold War generation, in Germany.' Lemper lived for a while in Paris and in London, where she starred in the Brecht- and Weill-inspired musicals of John Kander and Fred Ebb, winning an Olivier Award for her portrayal of the merry murderess Velma Kelly in 'Chicago,' a role she also played on Broadway. Since 1998 she has called New York home; she currently resides on the Upper West Side with her second husband, the musician Todd Turkisher. Turkisher played percussion on 'Pirate Jenny,' which also features 'Mack the Knife,' 'My Ship,' 'Speak Low' and 'Surabaya Johnny.' Co-produced by David Chesky, Turkisher's frequent collaborator, and Lemper, the tracks wrap her pungent, dramatically astute vocals — applied through the years to the words and music of artists as diverse as Jacques Brel, Philip Glass, Nick Cave and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda — in Chesky's atmospheric, often eerie arrangements. The album sprang from a conversation Lemper had last year with Chesky, who released it on his label, the Audiophile Society. Lemper pointed out to Chesky, also a composer, that 2025 would be the 125th anniversary of Weill's birth. 'And he said, 'you should do something different. Let's make it more accessible for a new generation, with a groovy component, but without watering down the strength of the stories.'' In an email exchange, Chesky wrote, 'Ute owns this genre of Weill material; she understands the world of Brecht and Weill better than anyone I have ever encountered. But I proposed to her, what if we took these classic songs and set them in this dark, late-night, Berlin cabaret vibe, while using the electronic language of today's music? Then you have versions that still honor the songs but have a more direct connection to today's world.' Adrienne Haan, another German-born, New York-based singer who has won acclaim performing a range of international material, including Weill's songs, was a teenager when she first discovered Lemper. In a phone interview, Haan, 47, said she had been influenced by many artists who recorded from the 1920s through the '50s, 'but Ute was much closer to my age, and she was such a strong interpreter. There was a certain steel in her voice, and I found it fascinating that someone from Germany, from the generation above me, could make it in America.' A prolific live performer, Lemper will trace Weill's life and songbook on May 27 and 29 at the Manhattan cabaret venue 54 Below. The engagement follows one earlier this month at Neue Gallerie, where she presented another favorite program, 'Rendezvous With Marlene,' based on a three-hour phone conversation she had in the late 1980s with another German woman known for denouncing Hitler: Marlene Dietrich. Lemper had written Dietrich, then in her late 80s, 'to apologize' for comparisons that had been drawn between them, 'and to thank her for the inspiration she had given to generations of women,' she said. 'Marlene was a woman ahead of her time; she raised the gender question 100 years ago — she was bisexual, she dressed like a man,' she added. 'And she became an American citizen and fought against the Nazis, entertaining troops on the front lines. She wanted to go home later, but the Germans thought she was a traitor.' Attentive to history's darker recurrences as well as its nuances, Lemper is wary of certain comparisons that have been made involving President Trump. 'There is only one Hitler,' she said, but called the current moment a 'new chapter,' that is 'really worrisome' in no uncertain terms. Lemper has also been interested in expressing herself more through songwriting. In 2023 she released 'Time Traveler,' consisting entirely of original material, as well as a memoir in German with the same title, 'Die Zeitreisende' — featuring an epilogue by her daughter, Stella, who just earned her master's degree in creative writing at Columbia University. 'I had already published a memoir when I was 30,' Lemper mused. 'An East German publisher asked me to write it, because so much had already happened with my career, and living through the fall of the Wall.' She hopes the new book, which has been translated into Italian, can also be made available in English: 'I incorporated tales from those times, and obviously followed that up with more decades of life and motherhood and ups and downs. I so appreciate aging. I would never want to turn the wheel back — except maybe for a little less backache, and a new hip.' Lemper is considering a replacement, but only when she can find time in her schedule — which this spring alone has also included a German revival of a staging of Brecht and Weill's 'The Seven Deadly Sins,' which she first performed in more than three decades ago. 'We're going to take it to Paris next year, and then London,' she said. 'I still have more to give, and I have to give it at every performance. The more you give, the more you have.'
South China Morning Post
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Why upstart US opera company's stripped-down productions have found an audience
Dan Schlosberg remembers the day 11 years ago when his upstart opera company put on its first performance – in a yoga studio before an audience of 30 people. Advertisement 'We did Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins accompanied by an upright piano that we got for free on Craigslist and a violin,' said Schlosberg, Heartbeat Opera's musical director and one of its founders. Its name came 'from the idea that singers would be feet away from you', Schlosberg said. 'And so you would be experiencing their voices at arm's length and that would make a resonance in your heart.' Today, when many opera companies are struggling financially, Heartbeat appears to be thriving, with an annual budget that just passed US$1 million. But true to its initial vision, the company still performs in small venues, most with a seating capacity of about 200. Advertisement 'Very few small companies take up the ambition to do the fullness of opera on a small scale,' said Jacob Ashworth, another founding member and Heartbeat's artistic director. 'We don't do small opera. We do big opera in a small space.'
Washington Post
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Scrappy opera company Heartbeat thrives by reimagining the classics
NEW YORK — Dan Schlosberg remembers the day 11 years ago when his upstart opera company put on its first performance — in a yoga studio before an audience of 30 people. 'We did Kurt Weill's 'The Seven Deadly Sins' accompanied by an upright piano that we got for free on Craigslist and a violin,' recalled Schlosberg, the company's music director and one of its founders.
The Independent
08-05-2025
- Business
- The Independent
Scrappy opera company Heartbeat thrives by reimagining the classics
Dan Schlosberg remembers the day 11 years ago when his upstart opera company put on its first performance — in a yoga studio before an audience of 30 people. 'We did Kurt Weill's 'The Seven Deadly Sins' accompanied by an upright piano that we got for free on Craigslist and a violin,' recalled Schlosberg, the company's music director and one of its founders. They named their company Heartbeat Opera, 'from the idea that singers would be feet away from you,' Schlosberg said. 'And so you would be experiencing their voices at arm's length and that would make a resonance in your heart.' Today, in an era when many opera companies are struggling financially, Heartbeat appears to be thriving, with an annual budget that just passed $1 million. But true to its initial vision, the company still performs in small venues, most with a seating capacity of about 200. No small opera here 'Very few small companies take up the ambition to do the fullness of opera on a small scale,' said Jacob Ashworth, another founding member and Heartbeat's artistic director. 'We don't do small opera. We do big opera in a small space.' And despite its success with critics and audiences — performances regularly sell out — the company has deliberately maintained a modest schedule. There's typically an opera-themed drag show around Halloween and then two operas staged in New York City performance spaces in the winter and spring. Each work is condensed to 90-100 intermission-less minutes with new orchestrations that require just a few musicians. Marc Scorca, president and CEO of Opera America, thinks Heartbeat is smart not to expand too quickly — a mistake that has caused some small companies to collapse. 'Growth itself shouldn't be a goal. Excellence should be a goal,' he said. 'I always prefer companies to plan their trajectory as slow as possible so they don't overstretch and overstep.' Unlike some small companies, Heartbeat doesn't focus on new work or on bringing to light neglected old rarities. Instead, its website promises 'incisive adaptations and revelatory arrangements of classics, reimagining them for the here and now.' It's that reimagining that attracted Sara Holdren, a director, writer and teacher who first worked with the company on Bizet's 'Carmen' in 2017. 'Their approaches to the storytelling feel extremely of our world and about our world,' she said, 'without falling across that line into a sort of trite topicality where you say, 'Oh yes, I understand a relevant-with-a-capital-R political point is being made here'.' For Beethoven's 'Fidelio,' Heartbeat went to prisons and recorded the voices of incarcerated people, who appeared on video singing the Prisoners Chorus. For Tchaikovsky's 'Eugene Onegin,' the two main male characters became lovers, reflecting the composer's own sexuality. Salome in a pink skirt and sneakers And for Richard Strauss' 'Salome' this season, the teenage title character was dressed in a frilly pink skirt and sneakers; John the Baptist was imprisoned on stage in a cage with transparent sides instead of in an underground cistern; and during the Dance of the Seven Veils, it was a lascivious Herod who stripped off his clothes, not Salome. Heartbeat's casting for 'Salome' reflected the premium it places on theatrical values in addition to vocal ability. Baritone Nathaniel Sullivan, who portrayed John the Baptist, recalled that 'a big part of the audition was just straight acting. And in the rehearsals, there was a real focus on the storytelling. 'I haven't experienced that in a lot of other opera companies to that extent,' he said. Soprano Summer Hassan, who was cast as Salome, admits she was nervous at first 'because I had never done a role like this where I am the title character. 'I was really doubting myself, thinking how do I make this girl look so young?' she said. 'And they said, your physicality will do that on your own. Make her look confident and you will make her look like a confident child. They gave me the tools to figure out it was within me.' Perhaps the most striking aspect of this 'Salome' was the re-orchestration by Schlosberg. Instead of more than 100 players as called for in the original, he took a cue from the opening notes on a clarinet and scored the piece for eight clarinetists (who also played other instruments) and two percussionists. Heartbeat's final local offering of the season will be Gounod's 'Faust,' to run at the Baruch Performing Arts Center from May 13-25. The devil made her do it 'I had mentioned to Jacob that I really love devil stories,' said Holdren, who is directing the production. 'And I was fascinated with the idea of taking something so big and so weighed down with history and assumptions and seeing how much we could crack it open and blow the dust off.' She sees Mephistopheles less as a 'mustache-twirling villain' and more as 'a figure of hunger and loneliness slipping into the vacuums that human beings create when they are so desperate or disgusted with life that there's an opening for him.' Her production will be set in contemporary times, sung in French but with new English-language dialogue, and it will make heavy use of shadow puppetry. It's the first Heartbeat offering for which Schlosberg has not done the re-orchestration. That task fell to Francisco Ladrón de Guevara, a Mexican violinist and composer who has scored the opera for seven musicians, most of whom play two instruments, including Ashworth, who will play violin and mandolin and also conduct. Taking Heartbeat Opera on the road Schlosberg will be back doing the arranging for a rare Heartbeat foray outside the city this summer. The company has been invited to stage a revised version of Samuel Barber's 'Vanessa' at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. 'I'm really excited by what they've been doing, particularly in reimagining the classics for contemporary times," said Raphael Picciarelli, co-managing director of the festival. For Heartbeat's debut in Williamstown, the festival is setting up a new performance space that should make the company feel right at home. It's in an abandoned grocery store, and there will be seats for just over 200 people.
