Ute Lemper is a unique figure in contemporary music. Even before she began to sing, she commanded her audience with eyes that seemed to burn right into the back rows of the Barbican Hall. When she did sing, her voice had its usual unmistakable character, by turns acerbic and voluptuous. Recently, as well as starring in the stage version of Chicago around the world, she has been composing her own material, and in her programme with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, she sang her music alongside songs by Weill, Eisler and Brel.
Lemper's homage to The Ghosts of Berlin, played in a sumptuous arrangement by the orchestra, was a miniature cantata based on her experiences of living in Berlin, watching the wall come down and the building of the commercial centre that has colonised no-man's land. Over a soft string accompaniment, she narrated her story before singing a melancholy melody that lamented the "10,260 days" that the wall survived. In the repeated refrain of the coda, a ghostly Potsdamer Platz, there was an elegy for today's Berlin, still haunted by its past. Her ode to New York, September Mourn, was less successful. Despite her heartfelt conviction that "the dream stays alive", the song trod the wrong side of the fine line between sincerity and sentimentality, especially in a soupy arrangement for the Orpheus players.
The programme worked best when the orchestra was allowed to show off its own talents. Padam, by Norbert Glanzberg, a lover of Edith Piaf's, was an evocation of the seedy history of the streets of Paris. There were turbulent swirls for the strings and creepy percussion passages as Lemper's vocal line grew into an emotional frenzy, and the song became a nightmarish waltz to oblivion.
Without Lemper, the Orpheus players performed jazz-inspired suites by Erwin Schulhoff and Darius Milhaud, but this was Lemper's evening, and an encore of La Vie en Rose encapsulated the bittersweet beauty she brings to this repertoire.
