Max, Raabe, time traveller.
| Auteur | Weldon, Robynn |
| Fonction | People: interview of the month - Interview - Concert review |
You might find it hard to imagine a Britney Spears song being faultlessly performed by an orchestra fronted by a man in a tuxedo. You might think that wouldn't belong in the same repertoire as anything by Cole Porter or Kurt Weill. And you might assume that a modern German pop song couldn't have much in common with any of those. But then, you couldn't have seen the Palast Orchester in action.
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"Like cabaret?"
It seems to be remarkably hard to explain Max Raabe to someone who doesn't already know about Max Raabe. Excited about my upcoming interview with the leader of the Berlin-based Palast Orchester, I describe his glamorous, old-world style, the Weimar jazz inflection given to contemporary pop hits, the dry wit with which he performs original Twenties songs. I keep coming back to how funny he is. Like cabaret? Well ... no.
While Raabe originally trained as a classical baritone, it was through the rediscovery of light music from the Twenties that he established his niche. Over the past three decades, his mastery of this style--not cheesily nostalgic, but suave, sophisticated and playful--has become so secure, so expert, that he has been able to expand what I can only call the Max Raabe genre to include reinterpretations of modern pop, and even writing new songs, conceived as what might come if the composers of the past were writing today.
Having formed the Palast Orchester with like-minded fellow students in 1986, musicians who shared his appreciation for the songs of the past and his dedication to classically faultless performanc, success and fame followed with majestic inevitability. Raabe has appeared in a succession of theatrical and film productions (including 1994's ridiculously funny film Der Bewegte Mann, with a Palast Orchester soundtrack), played to packed concert halls--including Carnegie Hall, which he will play for the third time early next year--and even earned a platinum record (for 2012's "Kussen Kann Man Nicht Allein", the first of two collaborations with pop producer Annette Humpe), as well as establishing TV fame across Europe with very popular concert broadcasts.
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I first discovered him through his Superhits albums featuring elegant, drawling covers of such unexpected numbers as "We Will Rock You" and "Oops! ... I Did It Again" --and then through a few YouTube recordings of his vintage and original German songs. I was hooked by his ironic style as much as the eminently...
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