Carnegie Hall Festivals
‘Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice’
Max Raabe & Palast Orchester
Through May 2024

For many, mention of a “jazz concert” in the 21st century immediately brings to mind Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Yet, in the golden age of the jazz orchestra — the big band years — those legendary large-format ensembles almost never played anything that could be considered a concert. 

The vast majority of the time they played for dancers in ballrooms, though they did occasionally do brief stage shows in theaters. Because the act of playing this mainly instrumental music was not necessarily considered entertaining in and of itself, some bands were more theatrical than others.

On one hand, it might seem like singer Max Raabe and his Palast (Palace) Orchester play mostly the same kind of thing over and over: popular songs mostly from the late 1920s and early ’30s, generally in the same highly danceable, medium-fast foxtrot tempo. You might think that this music belongs in a dance hall rather than at a sit-down concert, but Herr Raabe and his 13 sidemen and women — not to mention a regular staff of lighting and sound men — work very hard to make sure the music is something that you want to watch as well as listen to.

During “Mackie Messer,” for instance, the format alternated between Herr Raabe’s singing and instrumental choruses by the band; Dirk M. Lehmann’s lighting put Herr Raabe in near total darkness while the band was playing and vice-versa.  Throughout the evening, there were dozens of subtle theatrical moves like this to keep the entertainment value at maximum levels. 

Yet the most entertaining aspect of the Orchester is the vocalist-leader himself; Herr Raabe stands board-stiff and sings in a high bari-tenor completely authentic to the period. He introduces each selection with a hysterically understated description delivered in a total deadpan: of “Frieda,” by the German songwriter Fritz Rotter, he tells us that it’s a song about the most important things in life, “how to meet somebody … how to get to know them … and then how to get rid of them.” 

The group alternates between Deutschlandish and American pop songs. There was also a pre-Louis Prima “Just a Gigolo,” which Herr Raabe opened by singing the original lyrics to “Schöner Gigolo” with just Ian Wekwerth’s piano before going into Irving Caesar’s famous English text.  

The band varies its tempos occasionally, and travels to other spots of the globe musically: “Am Amazonas” employed jungle effects reminiscent of Ernesto Leucona, “Warum” was a particularly Deutsch-ish kind of a tango, and “Rosa, reizende Rosa” used a lesser-known Latin dance form known as the “pasodoble” (a la “Lady of Spain”). For the Cuban song “Duerme” — which American listeners know via its English title, “Time Was” — two of the other musicians joined the band’s regular violinist, Celia Crisafull, to form a string trio.  

Overall, it was a highly entertaining concert and a highlight of Carnegie’s ongoing Weimar Festival, which, at two hours including an intermission, seemed far too short. The Festival continues at Carnegie with the invaluable alt-cabaret uber-diva, Meow Meow, who, like Herr Raabe is both a master musician and an outrageous comedian, performing “Sequins and Satire, Divas and Disruptors: The Wild Women of the Weimar Republic.”

Nearing the conclusion of the second act, the Palast Orchester performed what seemed like a production number from a Cecil B. DeMille silent biblical epic, Arthur Rebner and Robert Stolz’s “Salomé (Orientalischer Foxtrott),” which Herr Raabe introduced by telling us, “As a father, King Herrod must have thought ‘what went wrong with my daughter’s upbringing?” 

He followed by treating us to the Harry Woods 1934 swinger “Over My Shoulder,” with Rainer Fox playing a baritone sax solo and reed section chorus inspired by both Ray Noble and Benny Carter. Where most bands would then climax the show with their hottest and jazziest number, Herr Raabe ended with a vaudeville-style novelty waltz titled “Lulu,” in which the sidemen sang along wordlessly and then gave us a chorus doing their version of a Swiss bell-ringing act. It was, as Variety would have said back in the day, “socko entertainment.”

The band left the stage, but returned for two standing ovations and two encores, one of which was “Mein Kleiner Grüner Kaktus” — the mere mention of the title had the Deutschlanders in the house cheering. It’s a 1934 number by the Comedian Harmonists about a little green cactus that falls off a balcony onto someone’s face. “This song is very popular in Germany,” Herr Raabe explained in his bone-dry monotone, “because we still think that the situation is funny.”  

I don’t speak German, but, not least because of the chartreuse lighting effects, when it came to this song about a cactus, I got the point.