Million-seller Max to take us back in time
Stars in their native Germany, Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester recreate the tunes of luxurious distant times
RENOWNED for recreating the magical and seductive sounds of the 1920s and 1930s, Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester are now heading fr Birmingham.
Million-selling German crooner Max, 57, and his 12-strong line-up of talented musicians will be at Symphony Hall on March 5 during their first UK tour.
In November, their new MTV Unplugged album went straight into the Top 10 in the German pop charts, alongside Robbie Williams, Coldplay and Leonard Cohen.
The Palast Orchester was founded by Max and a group of fellow music student friends in Berlin in 1986 with the aim of performing music from Germany’s ‘Golden Twenties’.
As well as looking the dapper part, a great deal of care and attention goes in to recreating the original sound of songs which are now almost a century old.
Music has enchanted Max since his childhood in Lünen, a town in North Rhine-Westphalia, where Sundays meant old black and white films on television, in which “there was always a scene where somebody was singing and a band was playing in a big hotel”.
He recalls: “In my father’s record collection there was an instrumental song called Crazy About Hilde. It was funny and fast, but there was a melancholy sub-note by the saxophones and the vibrato of the trumpet. It was like listening through a pipe into another room, another era – like a time capsule.”
The young Max (born Matthias Otto) started scouring flea markets in the nearby town of Münster for old 78rpm records of German and English songs. And at the age of 13 he borrowed his father’s wedding top hat and performed some of these for friends and family at their local church.
“My parents were shocked but their friends, they loved it,” he laughs. “It was fun, but I never thought I’d be a musician one day. It was just a joke for me.” What was a joke at 13 soon became a serious career choice and Max went on to study operatic baritone at the Berlin University of the Arts, where along with learning classical technique he financed his studies by continuing to perform the songs of the Twenties and
Thirties – albeit keeping it secret from his classical teachers. He says: “One of my teachers came to me and said ‘another professor told me that you sing songs from the 20s and 30s – take care, it may ruin your voice and can be dangerous or difficult. I don’t like this idea that you sing other material’.”
However, after hearing Max sing some numbers, the tutor was impressed with his tone. “So I didn’t have to be a waiter or a taxi driver during my studies, I could start to get some money with music.”
Together with fellow students, Max formed the Palast Orchester but it took a year before they secured their first public appearance, playing in the foyer of a grand ball. Max realised they were a success when crowds gathered around their stage and called for them to “play again and again”.
He added: “It was absolutely amazing. We did our first concert and we got some TV jobs, so we said ‘after our study, let’s go ahead as long as the people want to hear it, and as long as we want to do it’. And we’re still doing it!” Over the past three decades the orchestra, which has had the same line-up since the mid1990s, they have released 20 albums and performed across the world, including New York where they played the prestigious Carnegie Hall.
One of their more unusual performances to date was at the star-studded wedding of Marilyn Manson and Dita Von Teese at an
Irish castle in 2005.
While Berlin-based Max might be the dapper and perennially youthful-looking front man, he insists that everyone in the orchestra has an important role to play in its success, both on and off stage.
“We don’t have any management,” he explains. “We tried a manager once and it didn’t work, we know it better. Everybody has a job in the orchestra, so we are a partnership. Everyone has tasks. Someone does the travel, booking planes and hotels. Another makes the deals with the local partners. Everyone has a responsibility – and it works.”
The musicians have 600 numbers in their repertoire, unearthing original orchestral and vocal arrangements in archives at home and abroad, including a treasure trove discovered in a library in
Chicago.
So, what can Birmingham expect?
Alongside a mixture of songs from the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, the programme will also include American numbers and songs popularised by Noel Coward and singer Al Bowlly.
Max concluded: “The music was written to take its audience away from their everyday problems. And it still works today.”
Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester are at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, on March 5.
The electricity humming in the air for this concert could have kept the National Grid going for some time. Not only was there the buzz coming from a packed auditorium greeting the return of Sir Simon Rattle to the hall he launched, there were also the positive ions emanating from his London Symphony Orchestra, liberated from the Barbican’s mush, and relishing the acoustic properties of this space.
Rattle plays Symphony Hall like the most responsive of instruments, and here, with the supreme skills of the LSO willingly deployed, he achieved the most astonishing dynamic range, from the subtlest of pianissimos to roaring fortissimos. There was also a luminous clarity of detail, even in the most denselyscored pages of the three works by Berg which constituted the first half of the evening.
Dorothea Roschmann was the soprano soloist in the composer’s Seven Early Songs, gloriously sensitive to the music’s gorgeous late-Romantic hues, sometimes using her versatile voice as just another element in the often chamber-like textures.
I caught the recent BBC Radio 3 relay of Richard Strauss’ Rosenkavalier from the New York Met under Rattle, and in his affectionate conducting here he showed how immersed in the fin-de-siecle idiom he is. A reconstruction of Berg’s uncompleted Passacaglia led directly into the fascinating soundworld of the Three Pieces, Op.6. Imagery colour and rhythmic pungency were conveyed grippingly in Rattle’s patiently built reading, culminating in the March, heavily influenced, even down to the hammer-blows, by Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, a work beloved by Rattle.
Many of the players could go back to the smoke at the interval, with a drastically reduced orchestra giving us Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7 to conclude. Actually, not totally reduced, as Rattle expanded the brass section, and intriguingly added two contrabassoons to beef up the bass line. The care with which he sculpted the textures of the Allegretto was mesmerising, and the sheer energy unleashed in the finale, properly bursting in immediately after the Scherzo, brought us to a whirlwind of a conclusion. Some of us might have had quibbles about a few manipulations of tempo, but the overall effect was quite intoxicating, and the cheers at the end said it all. And Rattle and his orchestra beamed back at us across the footlights.
Christopher Morley
The CBSO has been targeting young concert-goers since at least 1921. But still it was a nice statement of intent to hand the very first evening concert of the orchestra’s 100th birthday year to a team of “Youth Ambassadors”, who chose an entire programme – duly performed by Jaume Santonja Espinós and an expensive-looking CBSO. The idea was to offer a “vision of the future”.
Not everything worked. We were encouraged to use our mobile phones throughout. I did, and can confirm that it’s an excellent way to ignore the music entirely. And it would have been good to learn more about the “Ambassadors” themselves, aged between 16 and 21 but mysteriously un-named and largely invisible until the final bow, though two of them came on to recite the whole of Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune. Full marks for sheer courage.
What’s clear, though, is that they love the sound of an orchestra, and have a knack for choosing the kind of pieces that leave you smiling. How refreshing to hear an audience (and it was a sizeable crowd, drawn from all age-groups) laughing out loud at the vocal explosives of soloist MaJiKer in Anna Meredith’s Concerto for Beatboxer, or sighing with pleasure at the end of Debussy’s Prélude. Espinós seemed to be enjoying it as much as anyone, drawing zesty, energised performances of Shostakovich’s second Jazz Suite and Mason Bates’s Adams-on-uppers orchestral showpiece Mothership.
After a fabulously louche opening glissando from clarinettist Oliver Janes, Louis Schwizgebel was a stylish soloist in Rhapsody in Blue, while guest-leader Vesselin Gellev duetted smokily with Eduardo Vassallo’s cello in Piazzolla’s Winter. Huge fun, then, and the list of pieces that the youngsters were obliged to leave out – which featured Kurt Weill, Granville Bantock and Robert Farnon’s Portrait of a Flirt – suggests a musical future that I, for one, could get behind.
Richard Bratby