Max Raabe and Palast Orchester.
Max Raabe and Palast Orchester
At Koerner Hall in Toronto on Thursday
Max Raabe, looking preternaturally elegant in his white tie and tails, is everything you'd expect of a prewar crooner in a German hotel orchestra. His blond hair is combed straight back, his posture is perfectly erect, and his voice is light and sweet as it arches effortlessly into falsetto.
He's also one thing you wouldn't expect: wickedly funny.
Because Raabe and his 13-piece Palast Orchester specialize in dance music from the late '20s and early '30s, descriptions of their performances invariably invoke either Weimar Germany or the musical Cabaret. But while that nails the period and the sound, it also suggests something dark and gloomy lurking beneath those vintage arrangements. After all, we all know how the Weimar era ended.
But Raabe comes to all this from a slightly different angle. Born in 1962, he discovered the pre-war sound through old movies and records, embracing it the way an earlier generation of music fans embraced classic blues.
He's not ignoring the historical context so much as stepping around, using a combination of ironic detachment, period dress-up and martini-dry wit to make the whole thing seem like classy, lighthearted fun – even if he never cracks a smile.
Instead, he's a master of deadpan, making more of a slightly arched eyebrow than most comedians can pull from a pratfall. Take, for example, the way he introduced Dort tantz Lulu, which closed the second set. Raabe announced it as a waltz.
"A German waltz," he added, as his eyebrow moved up a millimetre or two. "It's not as elegant as a waltz from Vienna, but it's much louder."
Also much funnier, what with its "a-ha-ha, u-hu-hu!" refrain – dutifully echoed by the instrumentalists – and a final chorus played on hand bells. You won't find that sort of thing in either Strauss.
Not that the hand bells turned up anywhere else in their repertoire. For the most part, the group kept to a "jazz band" instrumentation, with four saxophones (with each doubling on flute or clarinet), two trumpets, one trombone, a violin, and a rhythm section with the guitarist doubling on banjo, and the bassist doubling on sousaphone.
But what they played wasn't jazz, or for that matter even improvised. The Palast Orchester harks back to an age before swing, when popular music had only just begun to absorb the "hot" rhythms of jazz. As such, its vibrato-laden saxophones, plunking banjo and the frequently muted brass evoke not the Big Band era but the sound of old Warner Bros. cartoons.
Some of the pieces seemed designed to play up that impression. Salomé, as Raabe informed us, was subtitled "An oriental foxtrot," and indeed, it served up more Eastern exoticism in three minutes than Turandot does in as many hours. Schöne Isabella Aus Kastilien featured a wonderfully animated instrumental section after the vocal (plus a hysterical castanet solo by percussionist Vincent Riewe), and of course Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf sounded cartoony – it was originally from a cartoon!
Raabe and the Palast Orchester have only just begun to approach the North American market – One Cannot Kiss Alone, their first release on this side of the Atlantic, came out last month – they've been big stars in Germany since the '90s. But even when the cultural references (or the lyrics) don't translate, the sheer musicality of their performance carried the day.
For example, I don't know enough about the prewar German vocal group the Comedian Harmonists to fully appreciate what Raabe and company did with Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt (a song known in English as Falling in Love Again). But it was hard not to be awed by the power of the sound, particularly Raabe's penetrating falsetto, and that's what makes me eager to hear this band again.
Special to The Globe and Mail