With his starlit gaze and sweet, smooth voice, Max Raabe is a
modern-day Rudy Vallee. On stage, the tall and slender
baritone’s seductiveness is further accentuated by the
elegant 1920s style tuxedo he wears. But the baritone also has a
surprisingly offbeat sense of humor.
“Once I sat on a chair and left to go to the mike during a
concert but my tuxedo coattail was caught in the chair, and the
chair followed me like a dog. That sometimes happens,” Raabe
said.
Similarly, the group Raabe fronts, Berlin’s 12-piece
Palast Orchester, which performs Hollywood’s Golden Age music
from the ’20s and ’30s, likes to portray the elegance
of the era by performing in period costumes. But they also like to
emphasize what Raabe says is the humorous side of the
roaring-’20s music they perform.
“It’s a funny music,” Raabe said. “And
of course, we have some elegant and sentimental songs in between,
but there’s always irony. It’s a mix of irony,
sentimentality and kitsch.”
In 1992, Raabe wrote a witty song called “Kein Schwein
Ruft Mich An,” or “No Pig Ever Calls Me,” which
brought the group stardom in Europe. In the song, Raabe moans to a
tango rhythm about no one wanting to call him or showing interest
in him. The song, however, proved otherwise, as it garnered Raabe
and his group massive popularity, even becoming a ring tone for one
mobile phone company.
After releasing a total of 20 albums in which they have
performed the work of composers like Austrian-American Walter
Jurmann and German Kurt Weill, the orchestra’s popularity in
Europe continues to grow with each year, but it is as much for the
group’s elegance as it is for the group’s kooky sense
of humor.
The group has even received compliments from Simon Rattle,
conductor of the renowned Berlin Philharmonic. And last year, the
group sold out 18 weeks of its revue show in Germany. They have
also performed in front of 50,000 people in Vienna, Austria.
Some other lighthearted self-penned songs have included
“Viagra” and “Klonen kann sich lohnen,”
meaning “Cloning Can Make Sense.”
In 2000 and 2002, Raabe and the orchestra also produced two
albums of pop song covers done in the musical style of the
“˜20s and “˜30s. The songs covered included Britney
Spears’ “Oops, I Did It Again” and Tom
Jones’ “Sex Bomb.”
“That was a joke for us,” Raabe said, “but
suddenly we were in the charts in Russia and in Italy.”
In fact, Raabe and the Palast Orchester’s pop song cover
albums beat out sales of any Beatles albums in Lithuania.
The group certainly didn’t expect to make such commercial
success with what they thought were joking albums, but then again,
they also didn’t expect 18 years ago to still be performing
in the group.
At the Berlin University of the Arts in 1986, Raabe co-founded
the Palast Orchester with other university students simply to pay
off a little of their tuition. But before Raabe had even graduated
from the university, the group had already made quite a name for
itself in Berlin. Eighteen years later, the group is still going
strong.
Although not all their work has been serious, Raabe said that
their main goal has been to preserve this era of music almost like
a musicologist would.
“From the very beginning we were very serious with the
music,” Raabe said, “and it was important for us to
sound like the music from the old black and white pictures, from
the old 78 records.”
Ultimately, the group hopes to expose this genre of music to all
generations, and so far, the effort has been successful. Their
audiences have included kindergartners as well as at least one
centenarian, according to Raabe.
“It’s important that people see that this is music
without age,” Raabe said. “Maybe the music is 70 years
old, but if you sit there, it’s strange and modern in a way.
I can’t explain. Our concert is not a visit to a museum,
it’s still alive and powerful and elegant and crazy and
ironic.”