Ute Lemper chante Kurt Weill

Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill (1992) was directed by Jean-Pierre Barizien. The film depicts a live performance by Ute Lemper at a Paris cabaret, "Les Bouffes du Nord." Jeff Cohen is at the piano as her accompanist.

Lemper has a great voice and a very attractive stage presence. She's German, but she appears to be fluent in English and--apparently--French. She looks and acts as if she were born to sing Bertolt Brecht lyrics and Kurt Weill's music.

Every chanteuse wants to put her own stamp on the songs she sings, and Lemper is no exception. However, as an earlier reviewer noted, sometimes she puts too much of her stamp on the songs. This is especially true in the great song "I'm a Stranger Here Myself." She whispers, she shouts, and, along the way, loses the sense of the song.

It's interesting to me that YouTube has a version of Lemper performing the same song with an orchestra, in which she sings it in a less mannered, more realistic manner, and it's great. (I think the definitive version is that by Teresa Stratas. However, she was an opera singer, not a chanteuse, so her version relies on her high, high soprano.)

This is a DVD worth seeing if you're an Ute Lemper fan, or a Kurt Weill fan. I enjoyed it, but I'm both a Lemper and a Weill fan. If you're neither, it might not work for you.

This movie carries an impossibly high IMDb rating of 8.7. However, only 38 people rated it. Apparently, all of them love Lemper and Weill. My rating (number 39) was an 8.0.