Ute

London Records' Ute Lemper compilation takes its title from a song she sang in her London appearance in the musical Chicago in 1998; it is followed at the start of the disc by her performance of "Don't Tell Mama," a song from another Kander & Ebb show, Cabaret, that she appeared in 1986, and which she recorded on her debut album for Columbia, Crimes of the Heart, in 1987. The two songs neatly dovetail her work over the 12-year period, not only because they are show tunes by the same songwriters but also because they are both pastiches of interwar music, and Lemper has specialized in actual interwar music in between.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was not only one of the greatest and most important of the German poets, but without doubt alsothe one whose lyrics were most frequently set to music. The album Goethe Project by the German soprano Ute Ziemer and pianistHiroko Imai provides a lasting impression of the diversity of composers who used Goethe's works as the basis for songs. Inaddition to popular composers such as Schumann, Grieg, Schubert, Verdi, Strauss, Wolf or Wagner, there are also barely performedworks by Amy Beach, Johann Xaver Sterkel, Fanny Hensel, Josephine Lang, Anton Webern or Alban Berg. Even to this day, Goethecontinues to fascinate composers as a poet, as shown by the songs dedicated to Ute Ziemer by Enjott Schneider (*1950), DorotheaHofmann (*1961) and Johannes Martin Krnzle (*1962), which were recorded for the first time for this CD.