If you are familiar with singer/actress Ute Lemper, then you know why this is on our list. If you don’t, you have a great opportunity to see and hear what makes this extraordinary singer so powerful. Tuesday, April 21st, Ute Lemper: Live with Carnegie Hall will take place at 2 PM EDT/11 AM PDT. You’ll be able to watch this on Carnegie Hall’s website as well as their Facebook and Instagram pages.
The focus of this Live with Carnegie Hall event will be next year’s Voices of Hope: Artists in Times of Oppression festival. Lemper, who will perform at Carnegie Hall in April of 2021, will be commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of concentration camps.
The songs she will perform as part of that concert, and, no doubt, part of this live-streaming event, will focus on songs written during the Holocaust that celebrate rebellion, hope, defiance and so much more.
When I interviewed Lemper in 2015 for an appearance at The Wallis in Beverly Hills, she was already tackling some of this material. She told me why these songs were important to her.
“Many composers made it out of Germany, but there were a huge number that didn’t,” she says. “There was a [concentration] camp for the cultural elite, and composers were encouraged to keep writing to show off that the Nazis had a humane camp. There was unbelievable creativity in those years—a huge number of works created. But everyone there was sent to Auschwitz to be killed. Most of it is in Yiddish. The stories are completely, unbelievably heartbreaking. Some of them reflect the suffering, the slaughter of children, and the horrors of the camp. Others were entertaining as they were asked to write material to entertain the audiences and the Nazis who came to the show.”
Her performance was extraordinary and the years since that concert have given her more time to explore material, dig deeper into the songs she already knew and the end results will, I assure you, be very moving.
Don’t worry if you didn’t watch Ute Lemper: Live with Carnegie Hall today. You can watch the full show on Carnegie Hall’s website.
Photo of Ute Lemper by Steffen Thalemann/Courtesy of Carnegie hall