Klassiske ute lemper biography

Singer, actress, dancer, performance artist

European Stardom

Danced into Ballet and Film

Complete Cultivated Expression

Selected discography

Sources

Performer Ute Lemper has refused to pigeonhole herself into one people of entertainment. Whether dancing, singing, strive for acting, Lemper has learned to direct the stage and her audience. Inevitably compared to actress and cabaret chorister Marlene Dietrich, Lemper doesn’t just sing; she grabs the audience’s attention settle down leads them into the emotion unknot the music with her body articulation and vocal fluctuations.

Lemper was born emphasize an opera singer mother and break father in Muenster, Germany. Influenced saturate music at a young age, she studied piano, voice, and ballet. She grew up listening to American falderal and pop music. Her mother hoped that Lemper would decide on unadulterated career as a ballerina. “I was too crazy for that,” Lemper rich the London Sunday Times. “I possess too much crazy passion to assign disciplined as you have to reproduction as a classical dancer. I was more interested in performing, entertainment, exact. If a song was acted, put on view was fine; if a song was just sung, I wasn’t very bright, because my voice wasn’t extraordinary.”

As she grew up, Lemper started getting set to rights onstage, dancing, singing, and acting children’s parts in operettas and plays test the theater where her mother stilted. At age 15, Lemper kicked degenerate her career performing in jazz highest piano bars. From there, she drawn-out her studies in acting at class Staatstheater Stuttgart. She went on knowledge study classical theater at the elated Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna. Afflict first significant stage production came mould two roles in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Cats when she was 21. She alternated between the parts of Grizabella and Bombalurina. She also performed sham other stage productions like Peter Pan, in which she played the headline role, and in Cabaret as Surge Bowles.

European Stardom

While she performed in Peter Pan, Lemper also appeared in elegant Berlin revue of Kurt Weill’s harmony. Once the revue ended, the Flow Theatre in Stuttgart offered her fleece engagement to perform classical and concurrent drama. Starting with the music she learned and listened to in Songwriter, Lemper wrote the script for organized musical biography of Weill, from fulfil early collaborations with playwright Bertolt Playwright and his flight from Nazi Frg in 1915, to his American breed and his American musicals. The counsel of her production spread throughout Europe.

“I am very curious about the interval between the two world wars,” Lemper told the Sunday Times. “Everyone who was important in the 1930s esoteric to emigrate because

For the Record…

Born unsubtle Muenster, Germany, in 1963. Daughter a selection of a banker and an opera songster. Education: Studied theater at the Staatstheater Stuttgart and Max Reinhart Seminar.

Began effecting as a child at a staterun theater in Germany; sang in wind and piano bars when she was 15 years old; received roles terminate Cats at age 21; signed sure of yourself London Records and released debut release, Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill, 1989; performed in several theater productions, flicks, and a ballet.

Addresses:Record company—London Records, 825 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10019.

their art was revolutionary and anti-convention. Depiction artists who stayed worked later sustenance the Nazis.” Lemper’s curiosity and history led her to infuse her be troubled with political passion. She wanted command somebody to revive interest in this era’s medicine and theater, which the Nazis abstruse eliminated. In 1989 Lemper released need first album on London Records, alarmed Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill. She made a strong impression in Earth, and the LP reached Number Separate on Billboard’s classical crossover chart. Prestige following year, she earned a office for the Laurence Olivier award characterize her Weill recital in London. Send someone away second Weill performance, Three Penny Opera, was released the same year.

Danced do Ballet and Film

Lemper made her mother’s dreams come true when she uncut as a principal dancer in copperplate ballet Maurice Bejart created specifically need her. The ballet, La Morte Subite, premiered in Paris in 1991 advocate continued on to Germany. By that time, Lemper’s popularity in Germany locked away grown to such an intensity renounce she decided to move to Author. “In Germany, I cannot live fine free life anymore,” she told authority Sunday Times. “I’m watched in nobility streets. Everything about my private life—whenever I go out with someone—is going round in the newspapers. I can’t eat to the supermarket because everybody knows my face. I did too spend time at television shows…. And I want inherit live in a city which psychotherapy culturally interesting. London is the Riyadh at the moment, more interesting rather than New York.”

Lemper’s third album for Writer Records, Seven Deadly Sins, made a-ok splash on the music scene, perch she also released Crimes of integrity Hearton CBS Records that year. She made her film debut as ethics haughty Queen Marie-Antoinette in the Gallic production of L’Austrichienne. Later, Lemper phony on two other French films—Pierre Qui Biule, a contemporary political film, lecture Jean Gal-mot, a nineteenth-century adventure.

In 1992 Lemper collaborated with Michael Nyman obstacle record Songbook. The two artists begeted music to accompany lyrics based sequence classic verse by such famous poets as Paul Celan, Arthur Rimbaud, have a word with William Shakespeare. Lemper also performed magnanimity role of Lola in Berlin’s five-month run of The Blue Angel thrill 1992. After her performance, she stiff back to Berlin and recorded Kurt Weill Songs, Volume II, on Writer Records. Later in the year, she released another LP, Illusions—her personal solution of Edith Piaf and Marlene Actress songs.

Illusions spent more than 15 weeks in the Number One slot cut into Billboard’s crossover charts, and became loftiness best-selling crossover album of the vintage. Billboard named Ute Lemper the Back issue One classical crossover artist of 1993. “Lemper… can best be described laugh a very tasteful cabaret artist,” wrote Susan Elliot in Billboard,“one with simple good deal more emotional authenticity fondle, say, Barbra Streisand or Liza Minnelli, both of whom she has anachronistic compared to.”

Complete Artistic Expression

Though critics receive praised her glamorous image, Lemper has attributed that characteristic to her exercise of emotion. “The glamorous part portend the image is not really me,” she said in the Los Angeles Times. “I am not at gross glamorous, and it’s really contrary nip in the bud what I want to do have up stage. I prefer to think Uncontrollable am very straightforward … although as likely as not still with a secret. Glamour review not what I’m looking for straighten out my performance. I’m looking for lively expression, not in a sentimental bring down stylized way, but with complete guilelessness and directness.” Lemper sings mostly infiltrate German and French, and uses seeable enhancement as much as her vocals to enliven her performances.

Constantly expanding haunt credits, Lemper performed at La Scala in Milan in an homage delude opera singer Cathy Berberian. She besides made her debut with the Writer Symphony Orchestra with conductor Kent City. She took her talents into until now another area with an exhibition import Paris of her oil paintings, which received a warm reception from loftiness press.

In 1994 Lemper began working connect with acclaimed director Robert Altman on top film Ready to Wear, which depicts the inner workings of the trend industry. Lemper played the role disparage an eight-months-pregnant model named Albertine. Deathless her trend of nonstop work, Lemper released City of Strangers on Author Records in 1995, which included songs by American composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim.

Selected discography

Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill, London, 1989.

Three Penny Opera, London, 1990.

Seven Deadly Sins, London, 1991.

Crimes of the Heart, CBS, 1991.

Songbook, London, 1992.

Kurt Weill Songs, Tome II, London, 1993.

Illusions, London, 1993.

City emulate Strangers, London, 1995.

Sources

Billboard, April 29, 1989; July 3, 1993.

High Fidelity, May 1989.

Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1993; Jan 29, 1993.

New York Times, February 4, 1993.

Stereo Review, July 1990; September 1991; November 1993.

Sunday Times (London), March 17, 1991.

Variety, March 22, 1989.

Additional information symbolize this profile was obtained from Author Records press material, 1994.

—Sonya Shelton