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MAX RAABE and “Fascinating!”

“Don’t miss it!”

“ and his Palast Orchester may be one of the smoothest treasures ever to hit .”

“Fascinating. A born crooner.”

“Most elegant kind of pop music.”

“Max Raabe and his 12-piece Palast Orchester are re-creating the music of the Weimar era with verve and class.”

A stylish evening of elegant music and sophisticated reverie with

MAX RAABE and PALAST ORCHESTER

The black-tie big band plays classic renditions of European and American cabaret from the 1920s and 1930s, evoking the heady atmosphere in the nightclubs and theaters of the era.

Faultlessly fitting tuxedo, with hair slicked back and a cheeky look, Max Raabe sings the best of the epoch with amusing nostalgia.

Songs, hits and couplets.

Cuban rumbas, cheerful foxtrots and elegant tangos.

Songs of amazingly serious, amusing, yet melancholy simplicity.

With sold-out performances in New York, , and Moscow, Max Raabe and Palast Orchester continues its celebration of timeless music in its upcoming Asia tour in 2012.

34 rue des Apennins, 75017 Paris, Tel: +336 12 09 06 62 www.avenaart.fr

Music review: Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester by Daryl H. Miller

February 18, 2010

It's the sound of romance. Horns sing with reeds and strings, seeming to set the very air dancing to the rhythms of waltzes, fox trots and pasodobles. A man, dressed impeccably in tie and tails, steps up to a mike and, in a focused, rounded falsetto, completes the close, perfect harmony.

This could be a musical interlude from a 1930-vintage movie, but for a couple of days this week, it is the past as brought back to life by Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester, visiting Southern California at the beginning of a U.S. tour that will take them to Carnegie Hall. Wednesday they were at the Irvine Barclay Theatre; Thursday they drop in at UCLA's Royce Hall. Raabe, in his Rudy Vallee-like voice, and his band have been performing in Berlin for more than two decades, and since 2001 they've traveled here to woo Southern California. Those who haven't caught them live have perhaps encountered them on YouTube, where their gorgeous re-creation of the 1920s and early '30s has been extended to include mock Jazz Age renditions of such present- day hits as "Lady Marmalade" and "Oops ... I Did It Again."

"A Night in Berlin," the program that Raabe and the 12 instrumentalists are performing locally, sticks to songs written mostly around 1930 -- songs that speak of love yearned for and found. Or that speak, perhaps, of a gorilla in a villa in the zoo.

This last is an example of the sort of German novelty number that Raabe and his compatriots present alongside such better-remembered tunes as "Just a Gigolo," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" or, a song they perform to absolute perfection: "Cheek to Cheek."

Another of the German songs performed Wednesday translates, according to Raabe, as: "Last summer my heart was under great duress when I saw Rosa in her swimming dress."

Tall, lean Raabe, with hankie flowering from his breast pocket like a boutonniere, performs this -- as he performs all numbers -- standing stock-still at the mike, his face expressionless. You have to look closely for those rare occasions when an eyebrow arches ever so slightly or his eyes pan slowly from side to side. It's hard to say just how serious he's being. The orchestra members, a bit more rambunctious, cue us in to the fun as, singly and in groups, they pop up from their seats to take the lead on a melody, forming patterns across the bandstand -- or as they conjure hand bells to brightly augment the sound.

Singing sometimes in German but often in English, Raabe floats notes -- downy, vibratoless -- in the air. Muted horns are heard from what seems far away, across time. We are in a nightclub somewhere in Weimar-era Berlin, just before things go to heck. We half expect to spot Christopher Isherwood scribbling away in a corner while Sally Bowles hunts the crowd for sugar daddies. The air dances. The world is in love.

Musical Days of Berlin (the City...and the Irving) by Anthony Tommasini

November 5, 2007

Max Raabe, the wry, unsmiling and nonchalantly charismatic vocalist who headlines the Palast Orchester of Berlin, opened the ambitious 17-day festival Berlin in Lights on Friday night at Carnegie Hall. As is his wont, Mr. Raabe gave running commentary on the songs he and the ensemble were performing.

Introducing one number in his world-weary way, he said that music “has always been closely linked to destiny and personal tragedy.” Staring at the audience and hesitating for a beat (his comic timing is flawless), he added, “Who cares?” Then he segued into “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?” the Frank Churchill song written for the 1933 animated Disney short “The Three Little Pigs.” Mr. Raabe was joined by three good sports from the orchestra, who sang the roles of the pigs.

Mr. Raabe’s quip about the deeper meaning of music said much about the aesthetic of the 12-piece Palast Orchester, which is celebrating 20 years of performing German popular and cabaret songs from the Weimar era and American songs of the time that gained popularity in .

Mr. Raabe maintains a detached attitude about the matter. In his own way he is a tenderly expressive singer with a light baritone voice, though, like Fred Astaire, he can croon his way to tenorial highs or dip to playfully earthy basso lows. But there is not a trace of sentimentality in his singing, not a slice of ham, even when he is having fun. When Mr. Raabe, backed by the musicians playing the band’s harmonically rich, casually jazzy and inventive arrangements, performs a breezy romantic song like the 1929 “Wenn du von mir fortgehst” by Hans May and Kurt Schwabach, it comes across as affecting and piercingly true.

The program provided neither a list of songs nor English translations for the German ones. But after hearing Mr. Raabe’s sardonic spoken summaries of the lyrics, even those with scant knowledge of German must have picked up the textual nuances from his sly performances. Take “Du bist meine Greta Garbo,” by Robert Stolz, with lyrics by Walter Reisch. What is it about? The danger of a man comparing his lady to another lady, Mr. Raabe said. “You are my Greta Garbo,” he explained “You are as blond and as beautiful.” Then he added, after another pregnant pause, “but not as rich.” This was all you needed to know.

Mr. Raabe, 44, began his musical life singing in a boys’ choir in the Westphalia region of , and that background affects his artistry today. Rail thin, impeccably tuxedoed, his fair haired slicked back, Mr. Raabe comes across as a wised-up adult choirboy with a slightly seductive glint in his eye. It was fascinating to hear him in “Cheek to Cheek,” the Irving Berlin standard that will forever be associated with Astaire. If Mr. Raabe lacked the dancer’s swing of Astaire’s singing, he brought a slippery legato wistfulness to the song that made you hear it freshly.

The Palast musicians, all male except for the solo violinist Cecilia Crisafulli, play with a stylishness, grace and vitality that do not call attention to their impressive virtuosity. Versatile as well, they double up and even triple up on instruments. Rainer Fox, for example, played baritone saxophone, the rarely heard bass saxophone and , and was a supporting vocalist.

Though there were three encores, the final piece on the formal program, “Cosi Cosa,” from the 1935 Marx Brothers film, “A Night at the ,” again captured the art of ambiguity that characterizes Mr. Raabe and the Palast Orchester. The lyrics try to explain what the phrase “Cosi Cosa” means. Does it mean yes? Or no? Well, yes and no. From Max Raabe, Vivid Echoes of the Past by Anne Midgette

October 16, 2008

A few months ago, asked to name my musical guilty pleasures on a New York radio show, I cited a track by the Comedian Harmonists, the phenomenally successful 1930s-era German vocal sextet. I'm no longer so sure this counts as a guilty pleasure. Like so many genres of popular 20th- century music, this area is increasingly subject to what one might call classical-music-ization: Like classic jazz or old-time Broadway, it's become an object of study, something one might encounter in the academy, something that people feel needs to be learned. The concert I saw Tuesday night at Lisner Auditorium might have been designed to demonstrate this point. Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester, performing a true-to-period program of hits of the 1920s and 1930s (including a couple made famous by the Comedian Harmonists), were the very model of an ongoing venture in historically informed performance.

"Historically informed performance" (HIP) is a term generally used for early-music groups. But it certainly applies to Raabe. For the last 20 years, he and the Palast Orchester (the translation "Palace Orchestra" doesn't adequately convey the sense of period and place) have been re-creating not only the music but the very sound of the 1930s. That is: They don't just sing old hits ("Bei mir bist Du Schön," "Cheek to Cheek") in the original arrangements. ("Singin' in the Rain" is offered not in the 1950s movie version but one from the 1920s.) Instead, Raabe (on vocals) and his 12- piece band (brass, , banjo, , percussion) actually get the hard-edged, metallic sound familiar from recordings of the period.

The whole evening is a studied exercise in reproduction, from Raabe's debonair look -- tall and thin, in white tie and tails and with hair slicked back, he projects a choirboy innocence flicked ever so carefully with moments of mischief -- to the sound system, which gives even the violin the tinny edge of an old radio broadcast. Everything is calculated. Tuesday night's program differed from the group's 2007 concert at Carnegie Hall, recorded and available as a CD for sale in the lobby, only in that two songs on the CD were omitted, and one of the encores was different. Even Raabe's spoken banter with the audience was reproduced word for word.

Not that it wasn't entertaining. Introducing the Comedian Harmonists hit "Mein kleiner grüner Kaktus," he briefly outlined the plot -- cactus falls from balcony onto neighbor's head -- and added, "This song is still very popular in Germany." There was applause from the audience, which contained many German speakers. "Because," he continued, pausing for effect, "we still think this situation is funny." And the house erupted in laughter.

What's fascinating is Raabe's vocal technique, which draws on sounds and colors you don't often hear these days. A natural baritone, he pitches his singing voice high, relying on a nasal head tone with a bit of a snarl behind it, and then rising -- a born crooner -- to a soft white-colored falsetto calculated to melt your heart. That snarl, and that white high head voice, were arrows in most singers' quivers in the early 20th century. An obvious comparison is Josef Schmidt, the petite and popular tenor who died in a Swiss refugee camp in 1942, but you can hear similar effects even on some recordings of Caruso, who died in 1921.

Partly for comic effect, Raabe keeps his speaking voice very low, a dark rumble contrasting with all that heady top; and he sometimes delves into this lower register when singing, which gives an impression of enormous vocal extension. The only time his approach didn't quite work was when singing Franz Lehar's tenor showpiece "Dein ist mein ganzes Herz;" we are so used to hearing the high notes ring out that the falsetto top here seemed pale.

If I haven't made it clear yet, the evening is a lot of fun. The program is carefully studied but also artfully varied, casting its net wide, from Cole Porter to , from Lehar to Marx Brothers movies. The band blends musical talent and slapstick camp; individual players double on sax and violin, or take little singing roles, now in a marvelously schmaltzy vocal quartet ("In einem kühlen Grund"), now as the Three Little Pigs in a version of "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" that doesn't need animation to come off as a joyful cartoon short.

My one caveat is that Raabe's diction could have been clearer, particularly in the rapid-fire German patter songs, when the band sometimes drowned him out. Songs of this period tended to be text-driven, and for me a consistent problem with imitators of the Comedian Harmonists -- of which there have been many over the years -- is that they don't fully replicate the hair-trigger clarity of the original.

Well, my biggest problem was with Barry Manilow, who was so taken with the Comedian Harmonists that he wrote a whole musical about them, but rather missed the point: Instead of offering their music, he wrote all the songs for it himself. In this repertory, historically informed performance is definitely the way to go. And Raabe does the best job of it that I've heard yet.

Ready to Pop Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester perform music from the 1920s and '30s by Ai Rudis

L.A.com October 25, 2007

The late 1920s and early '30s were a period of wild optimism and stock speculation leading into the Great Depression in the . In Germany, the economy went from post-World War I devastation to out-of-control inflation that led to the fall of the Weimar Republic and helped set the stage for the Nazi takeover, the Holocaust and World War II. While both countries were heading to Armageddon, what were they singing?

Pretty much the same thing, it turns out: pop songs that were romantic, optimistic, silly, often witty and totally unrealistic.

When you see documentaries of America in those years, the soundtrack always has "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," and the films about Germany feature march music and songs about the Vaterland. But the big hits that people were hearing on the radio and buying in the record stores were more likely to be along the lines of "Happy Days Are Here Again" or the German version, "Wochenend und Sonnenschein," which translates to "Weekend and Sunshine."

Max Raabe believes the idea was "to heal the soul and give an idea of a better world. All the films with Fred Astaire showed a world that never existed. The music itself was innocent, but you have to know the time in which it was created."

Raabe, 45, is the leader and chief singer of the Palast Orchester (Palace Orchestra) from Germany, which plays Sunday night at the Orange Country Performing Arts Center and Tuesday at UCLA's Royce Hall in Westwood. He will be singing those songs, both from Germany and the United States, and the 12-piece "Orchester" will be playing the old arrangements.

There was a lot of pop cross-pollination at the time, but mostly in one direction. An occasional "Schoener Gigolo" ("Pretty Gigolo") became a hit ("Just a Gigolo") in English, but mostly the Germans created new words for British and American hits, as well as writing their own. In the Orchester's concerts, the program will be about half English and half German, but Raabe points out that many of the English songs were also hits in their original language in Germany.

The Orchester was created to sound like the dance bands of the time, pre-big band. It has four saxophones, two , a , a double bass, a tuba, drums, a piano, a , a banjo and a violin. "Some of the musicians sing with me," Raabe said, speaking by phone from his home in Berlin, and several of them double on various instruments "so we can change the color of the music."

Those attending the concerts will hear classic songs of requited and unrequited love and funny songs emphasizing lyrical gymnastics, such as "Mein Gorilla hat eine Villa im Zoo" ("My Gorilla Has a Villa at the Zoo"). The one thing they'll have in common will be catchy melodies.

The only shadow in the "Sonnenschein" will be when Raabe announces the composers. Sometimes he explains why he makes a point of doing this before each song, and sometimes he doesn't, but his reason remains the same. "The audiences loved the songs, but the (Nazi) regime wanted the names of the writers to be forgotten," he said. "Everybody knows Cole Porter in the United States, but we have a lot of names in our repertoire that they wanted to make forgotten. Most of the writers were Jewish."

Some of the writers died in concentration camps, but some escaped and continued to write their happy songs in America. For instance, Walter Jurmann, who wrote the gorilla ditty in Berlin, ended up in Hollywood, where he wrote such diverse hits as "San Francisco, Open Your Golden Gate" and "All God's Children Got Rhythm." His co-writer on the gorilla song, Bronislaw Kaper, wrote the jazz favorite "On Green Dolphin Street" and the soundtrack for "Lili," including "Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo."

Raabe views the pop songs of the era he specializes in as "a modern kind of classical music. The music by Mozart was dance music - and entertaining music for the society of its day. But the quality is the same as a song by Irving Berlin and Cole Porter."

Raabe's fascination with this music began when he was about 14 and he found an old 78-RPM record among his parents' collection called "I'm Wild About Hilda." It was a foxtrot instrumental that was "wild and crazy," he said. "It was a happy song, but there was sadness in it, and that was curious to me. The music seemed so far away because of the arrangement and very bad mikes (used for the recording)." He began to search out similar records in monthly local flea markets and gathered songs in German, English and French.

His other interest was opera, and he began studies in classical music. To finance his schooling at the University of Arts in Berlin, he performed. Starting with a piano, he put together 20- to 40- minute programs of the '20s-'30s pop songs that he sang for weddings, dinner parties and patrons in local pubs.

Other music students in Berlin began taking an interest in this music and joined him in founding the Palast Orchester. It's not a contract group of backup musicians, but more like a rock band. The only player who's changed in 20 years is the violinist because "the last one had a child and didn't want to travel around without the child, and so we respect this."

The fixed group is "absolutely necessary" for the kind of performance they put on, says Raabe. "Every musician knows exactly what the other is thinking and playing. When we change the tempo in a song, we don't need a conductor. We know how to listen to each other."

The group is constantly on the road in Europe, playing around 120 concerts a year, and is increasing its touring abroad. After Southern California, it will appear for the second time in Carnegie Hall and then Philadelphia before returning home, but next year it's planning a three- week tour across the entire United States.

When he performs, Raabe plays a character, in slicked-back hair and glitzy period tuxedo, but he bristles at comparisons with the Joel Grey character in the film of "Cabaret." "He's very diabolic, and I'm more sophisticated and sensitive - and much more humorous. He jumped around, but I'm just standing there and doing nothing but singing and talking. I don't like to move around too much in my private life and on stage, and so I found a way to present the music that makes the voice and the facial expressions much more important." Judging from a previous performance, it would pay to bring some opera glasses if you attend one of the Palast Orchester concerts and don't have a seat close to the stage. That way you won't miss the droll self-irony that Raabe conveys with his expressions while singing such lines, in German, as "I break the hearts of the proudest ladies / Because I'm so stormy and passionate / I only need to look one in the eye / And she's already mine." Raabe finds great satisfaction off stage By Randall G. Mielke

Beacon News October 2, 2008

As a professional singer in front of a 12-piece orchestra, one might think that Max Raabe finds performing the best part of his job. Although he enjoys singing to appreciative audiences, it ranks second to the satisfaction that Raabe finds off stage.

"I find the rehearsals the most fascinating." Raabe said. "To discover a new song, to possibly have found it at a flea market or in an archive, to arrange it for the orchestra, to meticulously work on the piece and then rehearse it together, that is the most exciting part of our work." Founded in 1986 by baritone Raabe, Max Raabe & the Palast Orchester embodies the high style and musical glory of the 1920s and 1930s. Based in Berlin, the orchestra performs more than 150 concerts a year around the world. The orchestra had sold out performances in New York City's Carnegie Hall in 2007.

"We play the hits, dance-hall songs and chansons (cabaret songs) of the '20s and early '30s in their original arrangements," Raabe said. "We play music from the composers and lyricists such as Friedrich Hollaender, Kurt Weill, Mischa Spoliansky, Walter Jurmann and Fritz Kreisler. But we also have quite a few American standards in our program such as Singin' in the Rain or Cheek to Cheek. These are presented in the original arrangements from when they were composed."

It is the songs that the orchestra performs that most people find appealing, according to Raabe.

"The music and lyrics speak for themselves," he said. "The bizarre, archaic humor; the smug irony; the melancholy of these superficially carefree songs have found a large and also very young audience who have discovered this music for themselves. The pieces are timelessly modern. In their short three minutes they speak of love, jealousy and separation. From the first kiss to the last kiss. Or also about potted plants. Last, but not least, the audience feels the musical seriousness with which we perform the pieces on stage in their original arrangements. We treat the pieces no differently than we would songs from Schubert."

A singer of incredible range, Raabe has the ability to capture the cunning rasp of the cabaret singer, the carefree timbre of early jazz and the falsetto of ragtime. Max Raabe & Palast Orchester are slick and nostalgic and unmistakably modern through Raabe's skewed humor. Also impressive is that the orchestra performs without a conductor.

"We have a music director who is also one of the musicians in the orchestra," Raabe said. "During the concert all of the musicians pay attention to one another. Using internal signals and agreements we are even able to change tempos radically without a conductor." It is the interaction among the band members that brings great satisfaction to its leader. "The concerts with the Palast Orchester are a great delight," said Raabe about his role as singer and leader of the group. "We've known each other so well now for years; we can blindly rely upon one another. We all know how each one of us reacts on stage and the orchestra knows exactly when I breathe or make a pause. That, in itself, is the greatest thing."