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The Ophelia Orchestra: Sound and Smoke (Schall Und Rauch): The Music of the Berlin Cabaret Era (Provocateur Media [Norway], 2004, 71 min.) Produced by Tom Garretson. Orchestra conducted by Morten Gunnar Larsen. Featuring guest vocalists Henriette Myhre, Anne Grete Preus, Karin Krog, Ståle Ytterli, Solveig Slettahjell, Anne Baahino, Marika Enstad, and Børre Frydenlund. Available
from Provocateur Media's Webstore; click to order in Norway,
Europe,
and The
Rest of the World (including the USA and Canada). Berlin of the
1920’s was, as I pointed out in the liner notes of the Ladies
of the German Cinema
DVD,
“in the midst of a powerful renaissance that still affects the arts as
we know them today.” The Ophelia
Orchestra’s Sound and Smoke CD recaptures the magic of a more
forgotten side of the Weimar Berlin arts renaissance, and that was its
music and cabaret scene. The producer of this album, Tom Garretson, is
current advisor to musician/performance artist Lydia Lunch, and
former manager to jazz vocalist Silje Nergaard (Europe’s answer
to Diana Krall). Garretson
worked closely with the musicians on this CD, Norwegian chamber group The
Ophelia Orchestra, to successfully capture the gaiety, the passion, the
urgency, and the sleaziness of the music of the Weimar Cabaret period,
with authentic, realistic reconstructions of period songs propped by an
incredible amount of research. Most people know
of the Weimar Berlin cabaret scene via the 1971 movie Cabaret.
When you watch Cabaret, you get a slight taste of the
creativity, the glossy sleaze, and the over-the-top multi-sensory
experience that the Berlin cabaret embodied.
But frankly, after you’ve experienced the Ophelia Orchestra’s Sound
and Smoke CD, Cabaret will look like a clown circus in
comparison. This is the
soundtrack of Pola Negri’s Berlin period when she was out on the town.
But if you were to read her autobiography, you would get the idea
that she was naïvely dancing away and wining and dining in this scene,
blissfully unaware of the true nature of the decadence that swirled around
her. Garretson says that
Weimar Berlin’s arts scene’s closest modern comparison is the 1970’s
New York punk scene (which he participated in) for energy, noticeable
“hot spot” venues, and an “anything can happen” creative mentality
that coexisted amongst the “anything goes” morality.
With the amount of skill and variety represented here, I would say
that the Weimar period likely topped the New York punk scene in
both the “anything can happen” and “anything goes”
categories.
The songs are carefully chosen to take us on a voyage of fascinating breadth and depth in our tour of 1920’s Berlin, while tying it in with more familiar names such as Marlene Dietrich, Max Reinhardt, and Kurt Weill. The liner notes clue us in as to what each song is about and what its original context was, and all of this is done in a way that the reader/listener can follow and keep up with. My personal
favorite song is “Ich Bin Die Marie Von Der Haller-Revue”, which was
an introductory song from the lead dancing girl in a renowned topless
revue from the period. The
contemporary singer who performs this reconstruction, a gorgeous Norwegian
redhead named Henriette Myhre, sings with a sleazy, joyous warble
like an operatically-trained singer that has taken this lower line of work
up because the “higher” line of work did not work out for her, and
besides the perks of this lower line of work are a lot of fun!
I would have loved more songs from Henriette on this CD, but one is
better than nothing. I love
the bouncy phrasing of Claire Waldoff’s feminist anthem “Raus
Mit Den Männen Aus Dem Reichstag”.
The opener “Einmal Kommt die Liebe” is a sleazy and vibrant
celebration of unrequited love complete with chorus girl backing vocals.
The Anita Berber dance song “Morphium” is a brooding,
doomy ode to, well, morphine and opium.
The reconstruction of singer/actress Blandine
Ebinger's "Ach, er
haßt, daß ich ihn Liebe" jumps from tongue-in-cheek “it’s great
to be dysfunctional” droopiness to carefree flapper razzamatazz and back
again. The CD ends with a
song called “Totentanz” (“Death Dance”), which bemoans the
decadence of 1920’s Berlin and predicts punishment for its debauchery,
complete with some militaristic flourishes; so it even has its own
“Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” One thing that
really struck me in experiencing this CD was how different the approach to
performing music was then compared to now.
At the time, music was something for the here and now (or actually
the there and then) and not really thought of as something that would (or
even should) be preserved, in the same way that a TV show is watched and
forgot about or a newspaper is read and thrown away today.
Music was not an end in itself as much as an avenue for
performance, entertainment, and propaganda; it was part of a larger
experience and very contextually dependent.
Sound and Smoke brings this larger experience alive via a
fabulous booklet that acts like a window into the period.
The booklet stages the time and place, and fills in the details as
to the nature of the desperation, depravity, and high creativity that
resulted from it. It paints
stories and includes tantalizing photos of the cabaret stars and hot spot
venues of the period, dropping names left and right and inspiring further
inquiry into this alternate world of music and mayhem.
It seems that every bit of space in the 20-page booklet is used to
the best advantage to portray the Berlin scene in the small amount of
space allotted. For this
reason alone, this CD is one that does not and will not properly translate
to the MP3 way of doing things, and is probably the only CD I can think of
that has this distinction. |
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