Sukowa Plays the Role of Singer

When she wasn’t looking, Barbara Sukowa the actress became Barbara Sukowa the singer. True, the German-born performer — widely acclaimed for her roles in such films as R.W. Fassbinder’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980) and “Lola” (1981) and Margarethe von Trotta’s “Rosa Luxemburg” (1986) — has long enjoyed a parallel career in the concert hall. Among other endeavors, she’s toured the world’s capitals delivering the spoken, or Sprechstimme, sections of Arnold Schönberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” with the Schönberg Ensemble. The 14-piece Dutch group also backed Ms. Sukowa on a new album of lieder by Schumann and Schubert, a recording of lush virtuosity and piercing intensity that frames Ms. Sukowa’s dramatic gifts as surely as any camera.“I always feel like I’m an actress,” Ms. Sukowa said recently. “But I really should say now I’m a singer. I have so much respect for the big opera singers that I never dare to say I’m a singer.” Ms. Sukowa was sitting at a table in the Tea Lounge, a sprawling coffeehouse in Park Slope, the Brooklyn neighborhood she has lived in or near for many of the past 15 years. In a little while, she would head off to rehearse for the first of two very different concerts: On Sunday, she’ll be at the Highline Ballroom with a band called the X-Patsys, backed up on guitar by her husband, the painter and filmmaker Robert Longo, as well as the adventurous downtown stalwarts Anthony Coleman and Anton Fier; then, on December 7, she’ll join the Schönberg Ensemble’s pianist and composer, Reinbert de Leeuw, for a performance at Zankel Hall.“With me, it’s not about the beauty of the voice,” Ms. Sukowa said. “I’m not Jessye Norman. When Schubert originally composed these songs, they weren’t composed for the big concert hall, the Steinway piano, and the big opera voice. They were like house music. I loved these songs so much. People hear them with all these enormous great voices, which we all don’t have as regular people. I want people to look at the songs and be encouraged and say ‘let’s sing that.'”Though Ms. Sukowa has loved the European classical tradition since her Bremen childhood, she has recently become fascinated with the American vernacular, specifically blues and country music. Ironically, these are the very sounds that percolate in the backgrounds of so many German new wave films — a sign of the postwar colonization of the German subconscious, to paraphrase a line from Wim Wenders’s “Kings of the Road.” Even more ironic, it is complications over rights to such music that has kept “Berlin Alexanderplatz” — now playing at P.S. 1 in Long Island City, and out on DVD from the Criterion Collecton — out of American circulation since the 1980s.“I didn’t know much about country music,” Ms. Sukowa said. But when a friend, the artist and musician Jon Kessler, had a dream in which she was singing a Patsy Cline song, she decided to investigate. A few small performances here and in Europe followed and, gradually, Ms. Sukowa began to collect and adapt a body of songs, making intuitive segues between, say, Schumann Lieder and Muddy Waters. “I really love how the blues is close to acting,” she said, “because it tells a story, it tells something, and for some reason that was easy for me to access.”Ms. Sukowa hummed the steady, stomping rhythmic phrase from Waters’s “Mannish Boy,” then the similar pattern from Schumann. “I’m taking Johnny Cash’s song ‘Ring of Fire’ and combining it with a German folk song that goes, ‘No fire, no coal, can burn as hot as secret love,'” she said. In her re-imaginings, Joy Division backs up William Shakespeare, whose Sonnet 19 will lend Sunday’s concert its theme: “Devouring Time.” The performer doesn’t cite the line, “O, carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,” but it has a powerful meaning for her. While she was busy raising three sons, the youngest of whom is now 13, Ms. Sukowa stepped away from acting to a large degree. Aside from some minor parts, such as one in John Turturro’s recent “Romance and Cigarettes,” she has only taken a single featured role recently, in a European period romance.“I never really caught on in America,” she said. “I don’t have an agent. It’s too strange for me.” A previous agent insisted she not disclose her age, which is a very young 57, and she balked. “I am what I am. I’m not going to get plastic surgery. I had this discussion with my younger son. We were at a dermatologist, and this dermatologist suggested to me that I wanted to avoid wrinkles. Those wrinkles show that I have laughed a lot in my life, why should I want to erase that? Why would I erase the traces of my life which I loved?”

Sukowa Plays the Role of Singer

Sukowa Plays the Role of Singer

More from the New York Sun

Supreme Court Orders Hillary Clinton To Respond to Trump’s Allegation of an ‘Unthinkable Plot’ Against Him

Pregnant Lexi Thompson Embraces Indoor League as a New Stage for Women’s Golf

Gruet Expectations Get a New Label

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: ‘Criticizing Islamism Is Neither Islamophobic Nor Racist’

A ‘Despicable Betrayal,’ Schumer Sputters

‘Nonresponse Bias’ and ‘Some Very Red Terrain’ Has Democrats Hedging on Hopes for a Blue Wave

Israeli Election Officials Reject Claims of Stolen Vote as Netanyahu’s Party Insists ‘Dark Cloud’ Hangs Over Results

Trump Threatens To ‘Give Iran the Hammer’ as Netanyahu Pushes for Renewed Strikes Against Tehran

More from the New York Sun

Supreme Court Orders Hillary Clinton To Respond to Trump’s Allegation of an ‘Unthinkable Plot’ Against Him

Pregnant Lexi Thompson Embraces Indoor League as a New Stage for Women’s Golf

Gruet Expectations Get a New Label

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: ‘Criticizing Islamism Is Neither Islamophobic Nor Racist’

A ‘Despicable Betrayal,’ Schumer Sputters

‘Nonresponse Bias’ and ‘Some Very Red Terrain’ Has Democrats Hedging on Hopes for a Blue Wave

Israeli Election Officials Reject Claims of Stolen Vote as Netanyahu’s Party Insists ‘Dark Cloud’ Hangs Over Results

Trump Threatens To ‘Give Iran the Hammer’ as Netanyahu Pushes for Renewed Strikes Against Tehran