Dutch conductor and violinist Andr Rieu is the king of ‘crossover’ classical music, reviled by purists but beloved by graying fans the world over. Can his balloon-filled spectacles make it in the U.S.?
By JOHN JURGENSEN
A conga line formed at a classical music concert last Saturday. In a sold-out Vienna arena that will host Lady Gaga later this year, audience members danced in the aisles, waved flags from around the world, and pressed against the stage with flowers and wine-all for the Dutch violinist and conductor Andr Rieu, who held sway with a wagging violin bow and permanent smile for more than two hours, through seven encores and a deluge of balloons.
Wearing a dark blue tuxedo and gold watch chain, his hair swept back to his shoulders, the 60-year-old grandfather/sex symbol led his 55-piece orchestra through a program of dizzying variation. Between songs, he did comedy bits. “My orchestra is never sick,” he announced, as a clarinetist sneezed loudly and a screen showed a brass player pretending to vomit into a tuba.
Mr. Rieu played the “Gold and Silver” waltz by Hungarian composer Franz Lehr, then solemnly introduced Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song,” performed by a Brazilian singer backed by a local children’s choir. Occasionally he spun in a circle as he conducted. He proclaimed to the audience: “The absolute best crowd in the world is in Vienna!”
Then came the highlight-the “Blue Danube” waltz. The song “rips people out of their seats across the world, and I’m excited to see what happens tonight,” Mr. Rieu said. As the number started slowly, couples left their seats, with about 100 waltzing by the end of the song.
At concerts like this one at the Wiener Stadthalle, Mr. Rieu grossed about $96 million on tour last year. That haul landed him at No. 6 among the world’s top touring acts, according to Billboard’s 2009 tally-ranked just below U2, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen, and above Britney Spears, Coldplay and Metallica. Next month, Mr. Rieu brings his Johann Strauss Orchestra back to the U.S., where he has a following but hasn’t yet broken through. For the U.S. tour, he assembled a team that includes Miley Cyrus’s management firm to make a play for mainstream exposure. On June 16, he’ll perform outdoors at New York’s Rockefeller Center for the “Today” show.
Like a flashier, Euro version of Lawrence Welk, Mr. Rieu conjures what he calls “romance” for an older, largely female audience. Unlike young music lovers, Mr. Rieu’s fans don’t buy many souvenir T-shirts, but they happily snap up DVDs, then turn up early and often for concerts which often begin with “76 Trombones” and close with Brahms’s Lullaby.
Mr. Rieu (pronounced Ree-oo) considers himself a maverick of classical music, which he says his fans reject as an institution full of stuffed shirts. Critics say “I’m not in line with other classical artists. Well, I don’t want to be in that line,” he says.
The son of a Dutch conductor, Mr. Rieu and his five brothers and sisters grew up in a musical household. He took up the violin at age five and later attended conservatories in Holland and Belgium. But he was unhappy in the ranks of professional orchestras, including one led by his father. His wife, Marjorie, says her husband “loves classical music but he hates the way it’s done. The atmosphere is so stiff. In the audience, you can’t breathe, you can’t cough, everybody looks at you. That’s what he tried to change.”
Mr. Rieu has been building his orchestra’s profile for about 30 years, but he’s emblematic of a more recent phenomenon, the “crossover” category of artists. These performers embrace commercial tools, from amplified instruments to Frank Sinatra songs, and boast sales that dwarf those of their traditional-minded peers.
The Three Tenors (Jos Carreras, Plcido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti) triggered this stampede during the 1990s with a neither-fish-nor-fowl brand of classical. The concept was initially viewed as the savior of an industry in twilight, even as it threw purists into spasms because the masters had strayed outside the canon, singing hits from “Phantom of the Opera” and “White Christmas.” A new generation of “popera” (pop meets opera) acts like blind Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli followed in their footsteps. These stars largely traveled outside traditional opera circles, favoring duets with stars like Celine Dion over appearances at the Met.
Lately many critics, fans and artists have come to accept crossover as a genre unto its own-not a threat to traditional classical, though not necessarily a gateway to it either.
“When it first started, there was a lot of confusion,” says opera star Rene Fleming, a soprano who has dabbled in jazz, cabaret and, most recently, indie rock. Hungry for sales, record labels put pressure on their artists to experiment with pop, but many soon realized that core fans didn’t want their favorite artists dabbling. “Thankfully the line was drawn,” she says. Now, she says, the crossover artists have their own audience, “without a lot of overlap.”
In 2000, Timothy Mangan, who critiques classical music for the Orange County Register, wrote a scathing essay about the tide of commercial stunts sweeping the genre, in which he cited Mr. Rieu and his “saccharine perversions of Strauss waltzes.” In recent years, Mr. Mangan has gotten more pragmatic. With coverage of acts such as Mr. Bocelli getting double the hits online of the critic’s typical reviews, he began to see no point in a spate of negative reviews-in part because they draw blistering attacks from offended fans. So he established a different set of standards for these events, assessing them as pop concerts, with points for stagecraft and sound quality. “I’m trying to be more philosophical about it.” Still, that doesn’t mean that Mr. Rieu’s music has become his cup of tea: “I really can’t stand that guy.”
The Rieu repertoire includes ballroom classics such as “The Radetzky March,” which abut selections from the American songbook, including “Moon River,” which might give way to “Yakety Sax” (otherwise known as the “Benny Hill” theme). Mr. Rieu tweaks his arrangements for arena-size impact, playing some Strauss waltzes an octave higher on his violin and doubling the brass parts. He conducts his orchestra and singers while playing his instrument, a 1732 Stradivarius. “You bring your heart, I bring my heart and together we open our hearts and you’ll have the evening of your life,” he said in an interview.
In a densely consolidated music industry, the conductor operates independently. With no permanent managers or outside promoters, and negligible radio play, his family business has relied on television appearances around the world and has made use of ongoing appearances on PBS pledge drives. All of this lays the groundwork for heavy touring.
The live shows feed another pillar of Mr. Rieu’s business, sales of DVDs, of which he’s released nearly 30. “The people that buy, buy everything. It’s almost like the Beatles invasion has happened to the former Beatles set,” says Sally Chaney, who has run a bustling Rieu fan site and blog since 2002. A 53-year-old paralegal from Fairfield, Calif., whose tastes had run more to classic rock and country, she has attended some 25 Rieu concerts. Later this summer she’ll rendezvous with European fans in Holland for a show in Mr. Rieu’s native Maastricht, where he lives in a castle dating back to the 15th century. The maestro’s suave looks and style are a major pull on the female fans who “drool,” Ms. Chaney says, adding that his core appeal lies in the mood he creates. “I just happened to be flipping through the TV channels and I heard this pretty music. I was taken in by the singers’ beautiful ball gowns. Then here was this charming man, smiling. The happiness of it caught me. I immediately started buying the DVDs.”
Most of Mr. Rieu’s U.S. fans discovered him on public television, as they did with Yanni and John Tesh. Mr. Rieu first hit the network in 1995 with a subtitled concert video, “From Holland With Love.” His orchestra didn’t tour the U.S. until 1997, but the conductor barnstormed solo across the country, showing up at local stations for pledge drives. On live TV he’d play his violin, dance with the female hosts and urge viewers to “waltz to your phone.” “In the first year we visited 13 stations across the country in 12 days. They’d have cakes ready for him,” says Anita Bennett, who brokered Mr. Rieu’s relationship with PBS, which has licensed 17 of his concert videos and plans to add more. The programs have been aired by about 90% of affiliates during their fund-raising campaigns.
Mr. Rieu has sold an estimated 1.5 million CDs and DVDs via PBS (in addition to the 1.3 million CDs sold in the U.S. through retail channels, according to Nielsen SoundScan). He ceased his TV station visits eventually, but he continues to offer concert tickets through the pledge drives-scoring free promotion for his tours while giving PBS affiliates a way to localize their efforts. “There’s no doubt he has been one of the most successful fund-raising programs we’ve had on,” says PBS senior vice president of programming John Wilson.
But Mr. Rieu and his team want a broader audience. “We are still looking for the right people to discover what he does. One big TV appearance should get the ball rolling,” says Mr. Rieu’s son Pierre. Earlier this year Mr. Rieu hired Jim Morey to ratchet up his U.S. presence. A talent manager who has worked with Ms. Cyrus, Michael Jackson and Dolly Parton, Mr. Morey worked on the “Today” concert. To guarantee TV exposure, Mr. Rieu’s U.S. record label, Universal Music Enterprises, has purchased hundreds of cable advertising slots to air around the country. Up to five minutes long, the ads feature tearful fans, dancing couples and the usual balloons, pitching an idealized concert experience as much as the star himself.
Andr Rieu Productions is led by the conductor, son Pierre and wife Marjorie, who helps pick the repertoire and write the stage patter. A former German language teacher, Marjorie helped support her husband financially when he formed his own group in 1978, the Maastricht Salon Orchestra. His first steady gig: performing at homes for the elderly. “It was a tough crowd, but they were the only people that wanted to listen to us,” Mr. Rieu says.
Ten years passed before he got a record deal. He first broke through in Holland in 1994 when his version of Shostakovich’s Waltz 2 from Jazz Suite No. 2 topped the pop chart. With his larger Johann Strauss Orchestra, whose members he keeps on salary, he steadily expanded his touring range. In 2008, he played to his biggest crowds yet in Australia, more than 20,000 people a night, in a handful of stadium shows where he introduced a set with a replica of the imperial, baroque Schnbrunn Palace in Vienna as a backdrop. The transportable sets, of which there are three, each cost more than $4 million to make, according to Pierre.
But the huge U.S. market has been elusive. In 2006, Andr Rieu Productions opened its first office outside Holland, installing its chief financial officer, Roel van Veggel, in New York’s Chrysler Building. He struck direct deals with arena managers, essentially renting out their buildings for Mr. Rieu’s concerts. It’s a rare strategy on that level of the industry, one that allows Mr. Rieu to pocket the money he’d otherwise have to share with a booking agent and concert promoters. However, Mr. Rieu takes the hit if sales fall short, as they did on some U.S. dates last year. Only about 1,500 tickets of a potential 8,000 were sold for Mr. Rieu’s concert last May at the Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio. Because of the recession, “a lot of people walked away [from ticket buying] last year, especially with family shows,” says Chris Wright, vice president of sports and entertainment for SMG, which manages many of the venues Mr. Rieu plays-including the Nassau Coliseum on New York’s Long Island, where the 2010 tour begins. Mr. Wright said he expects the show to sell out.
Even those who have profited from crossover say the category has its limitations. “This is not cool music. It’s not hip,” says Peter Rudge, who manages Il Divo, the hunky popera group assembled by Simon Cowell. One challenge: courting a younger audience while keeping the group’s older base happy. After several arena tours for Il Divo, which grossed $53.5 million on tour last year, Mr. Rudge is weighing whether to scale back to theaters, smaller venues with more amenities. “An ice-hockey arena is not where our audience wants to sit. They’re not young kids who jump around. They’re lined up at 6 when the doors open.”
Despite his mixed standing among classical traditionalists, Mr. Rieu says he feels a responsibility to spread the genre, but on his own terms. It’s the same philosophy he applies to his own violin work. Mr. Rieu is an impresario, not Itzhak Perlman. He generally plays his instrument with the orchestra accompanying him, taking few virtuoso solo turns.
“There are so many other things in life than playing seven hours a day to master Tchaikovsky. I could do it, but I don’t want to do it,” he says, adding, “I don’t want to play that game.”