Ute Lemper meets Astor Piazzolla
A tour de force German performer in spiritual mestizaje with Argentinian music
Image Description: a ticket for the night’s performance display’s its title Astor Piazzola meets UTE LEMPER (with the performer’s name written in uppercase letters) right under the heading “Konzert Classics”. The ticket’s heading states its locale: Ernst-Reuter-Saal, Eichborndamm 213, 13437 Berlin; to its left there is the heading “Reinickendorf Classics Berlin”. At the bottom of the ticket, one can see in German the date, time, seat placement, as well as its price: Do 18.5.2023, 18:00 Uhr (Thursday, May 18, 2023 at 6 p.m.); Parkett rechts, Reihe 18, Platz 17 (Parquet section, right side, row 18, seat 17); 48,00 Euro.
There are performers who travel through cultures the way tourists travel through countries — collecting gestures, borrowing accents, arriving and departing without being fundamentally changed. And then there are those who cross. Who carry the mark of each territory in their body long after the music has ended. Ute Lemper is emphatically the latter kind.
On the evening of May 18, 2023, in the Ernst-Reuter-Saal of the Rathaus Reinickendorf, Berlin, Lemper gave a concert titled Astor Piazzolla meets Ute Lemper — a programme dedicated to the Argentine master of nuevo tango — and what unfolded over those two hours was not a German cabaret star performing Latin music. It was something far more unsettling and more beautiful than that: it was a woman who had made the border her home.
The mestiza at the crossroads
Gloria Anzaldúa, in her landmark 1987 work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, develops the concept of spiritual mestizaje to describe the particular consciousness that emerges from living at the intersection of cultures, languages, and cosmologies without resolving the tension into a false synthesis. The mestiza, Anzaldúa insists, does not choose one shore over the other. She atraviesa — she crosses through — and in doing so she transforms the very nature of the crossing. Mestiza consciousness is not a compromise. It is a creative act; an epistemological survival strategy; a spiritual practice that holds contradiction as the very ground of knowledge.
The concept was born from the lived experience of Chicana women navigating the US-Mexico borderlands, but its reach extends wherever a body carries more than one world within it. When I sat in that Reinickendorf concert hall and watched Ute Lemper inhabit Piazzolla's universe with the same sovereign authority she brings to Brecht, to Weill, to Piaf, I understood Anzaldúa's border not as a geographical fact but as a performing body. As a voice. As a black gown swirling in the stage light.
Between the Lied and the bandoneón
Lemper came to international prominence through the German cabaret tradition and the Brechtian Lieder — a repertoire that demands rigorous interiority, ironic distance, and a precise calibration between emotional exposure and intellectual control. Later came the French chanson: more narrative, more carnally intimate, insisting on the story told directly to the listener's face. Each of these traditions asks something different of the body. The Lied is vertical — it reaches inward and upward. The chanson is horizontal — it leans forward across the footlights and takes you by the collar.
And the Argentine tango? The tango is diagonal. It pulls simultaneously toward abandonment and toward absolute precision. It is erotic and melancholic and furious and tender, often within the same eight bars. The bandoneón breathes like a wounded animal. The tango's genius — and Piazzolla's particular achievement — is to have pushed this tradition past its own nostalgia into something genuinely, dissonantly modern: his nuevo tango refuses comfort. It refuses resolution. It lives, as Anzaldúa's mestiza lives, in the wound that does not close.
What Lemper carries across these traditions is not a neutral technique but a politics of the body: the knowledge that each musical language reshapes the performer from the inside, that you cannot sing Piazzolla the way you sing Mahler, not because the notes ask something different but because the body asks something different. In the Reinickendorf concert, you could hear her listening to that demand and answering it — not with imitation, but with genuine atravesamiento, genuine crossing.
"Che Tango Che" — the mestizaje made visible
The highlight of the evening arrived with Piazzolla's "Che Tango Che" — and if there was any moment that crystallized what I mean by Lemper as spiritual mestiza, it was this one.
She opened the song with characteristic authority, her voice carrying that particular quality she has always possessed: the ability to be simultaneously huge and intimate, to fill a hall and still feel like a confidence whispered in your ear. But as the arrangement progressed, something shifted. The double bass player and the violinist began trading phrases with her — not in the clean call-and-response of prepared arrangement, but in something looser, more alive. Lemper leaned into it. She improvised. She stretched a melodic phrase beyond its written endpoint, held it in the air, let the violin answer her, and then came back in slightly displaced from where she had started, as though she had taken a step into an unknown room and found her footing once inside.
And through all of it, the black gown moved. Lemper is a choreographic performer — her body has always been part of the argument — and in "Che Tango Che" she swirled the gown the way you swirl a partner in a close embrace: with intention, with weight, with the knowledge that the gesture has consequences. The gown became a second voice. The tango was no longer being performed for us; it was happening among us, in the space between her body and her musicians, in the improvised phrases that neither she nor they could have predicted at the start.
This is what Anzaldúa calls the nepantla — the in-between space, the site of transformation. Lemper didn't just sing Piazzolla that evening. She entered the nepantla of his music and brought something back from it that was irreducibly her own: German in its discipline, French in its narrative intimacy, Argentine in its erotic ferocity, and finally, irreducibly, hers.
What remains in the body
The Ernst-Reuter-Saal in Reinickendorf is not the Philharmonie. It is not the Staatsoper. It is a civic space — a Rathaus concert hall — which meant that the audience that evening was neither a specialist crowd nor a tourist audience, but something closer to a neighbourhood: people who had chosen this evening for reasons as varied as curiosity, affection, habit, and love. There was something apt about this. Anzaldúa's mestiza consciousness was never an elite proposition. It was a survival practice born in ordinary, contested, quotidian territory.
And Lemper, for all her international stature, gave a concert that was present in that space — present in the Berlinische sense of the word, grounded, without condescension, without the faint remove that sometimes separates a great artist from their audience. She was there. The music was there. And for those of us in the hall who carry our own borderlands within us — who navigate between languages, between cultural inheritances, between the self we were and the selves we are becoming — there was something in her performance that felt less like entertainment and more like recognition.
A mestiza recognises another.
The gown swirled. The double bass exhaled. And for a moment in Reinickendorf, the border disappeared — not because it had been resolved, but because someone had made of it, in Anzaldúa's words, a home.