When I was at the Deauville Film Festival in 2010 I was invited to see a live performance of a German orchestra that specialized in playing music of the 1920s and 30s. With great enthusiasm the person who invited me explained that the front man/singer was a perfect replica of a dandy 1920s band singer and that the whole act was guaranteed to make somebody like me, who digs a good deal of the culture of that era, idiotically happy. My heart sunk. I hate nostalgia acts. I hate people who dress up in old clothes with funny hats and act like they’re musicians from a different decade–largely because they tend to evoke the opposite of what they intended; they are almost always a bunch of geeks from decades later doing some sort of ‘tribute’ which does nothing to attract new listeners.

But I went to the concert anyway and there I saw Max Raabe and the Palast Orchestra for the first time. Dressed in white tie and tails, with his orchestra outfitted smartly in period black-tie white-jacketed evening clothes, Raabe’s performance was something other than I expected; he was a highly gifted, clearly well-trained singer who presented the material with odd, dead-pan, sly introductions. His expression throughout the songs was impassive, unsmiling, weirdly other-worldly. He came across as a performer from the past so full of himself and his superior skills that he couldn’t be bothered with attempting to engage the audience in any manner other than a frosty, stand-offish one. The musicianship was superb-the Palast Orchestra was tightly rehearsed and clearly didn’t suffer sloppy musicianship. Raabe’s alto-soprano range was mesmerizing and the entire presentation, while certainly steeped in nostalgia, had a different dimension than most; it wasn’t just an imitation of an orchestra from the past—it was a dramatization of the event of an orchestra from the past doing a show for you. This wasn’t just a musical act. It was true performance art. The above video is an excellent primer for those of you who don’t know Raabe and company. Raabe is interviewed (though not at great length) and you get a more than decent sampling of the whole experience. The featured performance was a concert given at the Admiralspalast in Berlin, a magnificent old venue that specialized in variety acts of the pre-World War 2 era in the city–in other words, as perfect a place for Raabe and his organization to perform as can be imagined. More about Raabe tomorrow…