#review Pompe: A Crack in the Voice

From the records I bought at the time, however, I somehow never really felt all of this – there was the typical ability to colour the voice, but it was always quite measured, so that the expressiveness was restrained, never excessively prominent, and the voice itself, in its basic qualities, even seemed unremarkable. I was therefore convinced that the singer's charm lay in her stage charisma, in a kind of marriage of body and voice.

[…]

The German singer Ute Lemper became a global star in the second half of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. (Photo: Ljubljana Festival)

All of this could be verified at this concert at the Ljubljana Festival (Ute Lemper was not, incidentally, coming to Ljubljana for the first time). Yet this time the impression left a different feeling from the records made three decades ago. The crack in Ute Lemper's voice is now noticeably wider. If in the nineties it could be understood as a step into expressiveness, an inclination towards the purely human, the pronounced shifts in colour between registers can now be understood as vocal fatigue, as can a somewhat less pleasing, emphasised vibrato. In the middle register and within narrow ranges her voice can still sound attractive, and when subdued also full of substance, sensual and emotional; but as soon as it opens up to the higher register and to dramatic animation – and the singer's personality often wishes to reach there – it becomes too rough and hoarsely strained. Of course, such shifts of register can also be interpreted as a distinctly interpretative note, as rebellion, social criticism, a kind of cabaret pose, and with her programme, especially in the first half, the singer tried to play precisely on this element of content. It was precisely here, in the unforced linking of individual songs, through which she opened a window onto the time of the Weimar Republic and partly also onto Broadway, that she proved at her strongest, able to connect the present moment with the painful experiences of the past. But over time, when Weill was placed alongside Ebb, Piazzolla and Brel – quite diverse authors, after all – the interpretative approaches sounded far too similar and dependent on the basic characteristics and condition of the singer's voice. Ute Lemper gave of herself lavishly to the audience – in total the concert lasted almost three hours – but perhaps a shorter programme, especially one centred on Weill, where vocal impurities can be skilfully turned to expressive use, would have brought even more vocal and musical pleasure.

The singer was accompanied by the Slovenian Youth Orchestra, which had an unenviable task – it rarely came to the fore, but had to wait patiently for its entries and maintain rhythmic precision. It presented itself with Bernstein's Three Dance Episodes from the musical On the Town, where perhaps Živa Ploj Peršuh's baton could have dictated more summery tempos. An additional problem was the amplification, which, as usual, revealed more problems in the orchestra's sound than the ear would otherwise have noticed. Otherwise the accompaniment was mostly solid, at times uncertain in the opening tempos. x

***

MUSIC

Ute Lemper (voice), Slovenian Youth Orchestra, Živa Ploj Peršuh (conductor)

Ljubljana Festival, Ljubljana, Križanke

3/5

***

It was precisely here, in the unforced linking of individual songs, through which she opened a window onto the time of the Weimar Republic and partly also onto Broadway, that she proved at her strongest, able to connect the present moment with the painful experiences of the past.

***

The singer was accompanied by the Slovenian Youth Orchestra, which had an unenviable task – it rarely came to the fore, but had to wait patiently for its entries and maintain rhythmic precision.