Enlarge image

Max Raabe & Palast Orchester

(© picture-alliance/dpa)

If you are in a mood to party like it's 1929, then the anachronistically dapper Max Raabe can take you there with his revival of Weimar-era cabaret and tin pan alley classics. While the world's financial markets dance an up and down tango that has raised plenty of talk about that era in recent weeks, Raabe and his Palast Orchester have been on their first US tour, reminding audiences that tragedy – whether in love or finance – always has a sunny side.

At the Lisner Auditorium in Washington, DC on September 14, Raabe led the versatile and playful Palast Orchestra through a set of eighty-year old songs that still elicited rustles of recognition from the audience. Cheek to Cheek, Bei mir bist du Schön, Singing in the Rain stood next to German songs from the same era, including two Weil and Brecht classics and the perennial favorite Mein Kleiner Grüner Kaktus (My Little Green Cactus).

Most of the songs in Raabe's repertoire are bittersweet and many are darkly funny. Like Walter Jurmann's Du bist Nicht die Erste in which a suitor tells his girlfriend “you are not the first, but you could be the last,” they take sly but sympathetic jabs at people's expectations. Romantic longing, the desire for wealth and vanity are as likely to lead to disappointment as happiness, but that does not mean there is anything wrong with getting the girl, getting paid and looking sharp.

Looking sharp definitely ranks high on Raabe's agenda. He wears his signature high-waisted tuxedo like a mannequin, his blond is hair slicked back as if with shellac and he addresses a vintage-style Neumann microphone like he is standing at attention. Occasionally, he retreats to the crook of the piano, where he observes his nimble band as if he were just an extraordinarily well-dressed onlooker.

Raabe's eyebrows probably traveled further than his arms during the set, however, and the stiff bearing is part of a deeply funny shtick. He gave a terse introduction for each tune, delivered in a deadpan tone like a Teutonic foil for Dean Martin. “Music has always been closely linked to destiny and personal tragedy,” he said in introducing one number, then added “Who cares? As long as you're not involved.”

These bits, which also appear on the group's most recent CD "Heute Nacht oder Nie" (Tonight or Never), are delivered with the same precision as the colorful arrangements and there is no question they are essential to the act.

Usually, Raabe's interludes trade in self-deprecation, inflating expectations and then lancing them for a laugh after a well-timed pause. Of the “Little Green Cactus”, a ditty in which the titular plant falls off the balcony onto the next door neighbor's face, Raabe announced “This song is very well loved in Germany...because Germans still think it is funny.”

Raabe also intones the names of many of the performers who made the songs in his repertoire famous, offering himself as a lesser substitute. “Singing in the Rain” was introduced as a “showy big band arrangement” made famous by Gene Kelly, but before the band started, Raabe pointedly remarked that Gene Kelly would not be singing, and that the arrangement would not be showy.

Still, Raabe, who trained to be an opera singer, did not let the evening pass without a few moments of showy virtuosity.  After announcing that he would perform a song made famous by the legendary tenor Mario Lanza and pointing out, again, that Lanza was not in the building, he began in his typical rubber-jawed croon but ended with a full-throated flourish.

When Raabe announces the names of the composers and lyrics the irony vanishes. In fact, it seems that his reverence for the songs and their bittersweet lyrics demands that he stay out of the way – singing without emotion or embellishment so that the songs and arrangements shine through.

For fans like Dan Lycan, a retired Army engineer from Manassas, Raabe succeeds in staying true to the spirit of the music. Lycan and his wife Alice have seen Raabe perform in Berlin, Philadelphia and Cologne, and they planned to travel to Richmond to see him the next night. “We're groupies,” joked Mrs. Lycan.

“For us old-timers, it brings back the sound of the 1930's,” said Lycan. Now 77, Lycan figures he started buying records in the 1940's, when the songs in the Palast Orchester's repertoire would hardly have been considered oldies, but were already golden.