Ute Lemper

Ute Lemper (National Concert Hall, Dublin)

On the right of the stage, which has a black backdrop, a hat and coat stand sports a bowler and a grey jacket. In front of the stand is a large old ‘Thirties suitcase looking packed and ready to travel. To the left is a dark Steinway piano. In front of the piano a high wooden stool perches and around the side sits another ordinary wooden chair. Two spotlights of different intensity shine almost directly down on the piano keys.

The layout of the stage emphasises space. A space. The need for space. Later on, another spot will zoom in on the long legged, slim woman, five months pregnant and a little drawn looking, the image of a young Marlene Dietrich, that queen of artifice and alienation. A projected pink hue will also lend an air of gaudy night-club decadence to German born chanteuse Ute Lemper’s ninety-minute performance of the songs of Kurt Weill who, along with Berthold Brecht, created the genre of music known as the songspeil, a kind of urban folk-musical theatre updated for the twentieth century and loaded with a provocative social conscience.

Rock music, both the mainstream and the marginal, has been feeding off this Weill/Brecht collaboration ever since. Their influence is too wide and far-reaching for a compendious list but, synecdochally, so to speak, witness early Virgin Prunes, Philip Chevron in between The Radiators and The Pogues, Marianne Faithfull and Nick Cave who covered Weill’s ‘The September Song’ from the musical Knickerbocker Holiday, an impassioned and highly dewy-eyed version of which Lemper delivered tonight as the fourth last selection of her innovative set. We were also treated to an extremely sexy, confrontational and unashamedly scornful rendition of ‘Alabama Song’, a number also interpreted by The Doors and David Bowie but to less effect.

The scheduled interval was skipped and Lemper’s economy of effort and energy on some compositions was quite palpable. However, when you’re expecting your first child in April such short-cuts are entirely understandable are they not? Besides, her wildly extravagant extemporisation on other tunes more than compensated for these almost innocuous truncations. As she veered from the ironical Broadway/Hollywood musical of the hilarious ‘The Saga of Jenny’ or ‘Tchaikovsky’ – a list of forty-nine Russian composers delivered at breakneck speed ( which you may once have seen Danny Kaye do in Lady in the Dark ) – through the agit-Jazz and Berlin expressionism of ‘Moritat’ (‘Murder Deed’) and ‘Barbara Song’ from The Threepenny Opera, to the romantic Gallicism of the opening ‘Le Grand Lustucru’ and ‘Je Ne T’Aime Pas’, thanks to Ute Lemper’s courageous artistic vision patrons of the packed Concert Hall encountered music which, for a change, challenged their assumptions instead of reinforcing them.

No small thing . . .

• Patrick Brennan