A timeless music, thoughtfully and playfully presented

Nostalgia has no quarter with Max Raabe.

That might seem peculiar for an opera-trained German baritone who has made an unlikely international career singing popular songs of the 1920s and '30s with note-perfect authenticity — the tunes heard in the nightclubs of Weimar-era Berlin or Prohibition-era New York.

For Raabe, that haunting, whimsical repertoire — the songs of Kurt Weill, Cole Porter and Walter Jurmann, among many others — is simply the most elegant pop music ever created.

And it doesn't need to be nostalgized.

"The music of Mozart or Beethoven is much older, and nobody would ask, 'Isn't that nostalgic?' because it's timeless music," said Raabe by phone from his home in Berlin. "The music we play is timeless, too."

Raabe's show is magnetically timeless.

Raabe and his 12-member Palast Orchester play Sunday at Bass Concert Hall, one stop on a North American tour.

Flaxen hair slicked back and perfectly tuxedoed, Raabe glides onto stage with nonchalant elegance. Standing statue-still, he introduces songs with a bit of droll banter, his deadpan comic timing flawless. (While his repertoire is sung in German or English, Raabe speaks English during his concerts in the United States.)

An expressive natural crooner, he coasts up to lyric falsetto highs as easily as he deftly dips into basso lows, along the way articulating (or chewing, perhaps) each syllable to perfection. Only the occasional arch of an eyebrow or the slight tilt of the head add panache to the ambiguous yet witty songs.

The virtuosic 12-piece Palast Orchester (horns and woodwinds along with drums, piano, guitar, banjo and a violin) exquisitely assimilate the timbres and tonalities of a period dance band, sometimes joining Raabe on vocal harmonizing, sometimes adding a touch of silly antics.

When the orchestra takes the lead with an instrumental number, Raabe retreats to lean — unmoving, elegant — against the piano.

Nevertheless, Raabe's performance is an exercise in exquisite minimalism, not calculated shtick.

"The irony is in the music and the words. Our repertoire has already a very sarcastic and black humor, with a lot of double meaning," he said. "We are funny on stage, in our own way, but we don't do anything to confuse the meaning of the music. It would be wrong to overact on stage."

Raabe, 49, found his way to this romantic, witty, melancholic music as a teenager in the Westphalia region of western Germany, where he sang in the church choir. While his peers relished heavy metal, Raabe found magic in the operas of Wagner, the symphonies of Beethoven and the old black-and-white movies of the 1930s that played every Sunday on the then-limited German television stations.

Poring over his parents' collection of old shellac 78s one day, he had a musical epiphany.

"I was suddenly touched by the atmosphere of the trumpets and saxophone sounds and the strange kind of singing, the crooning," he says.

After landing in Berlin in the 1980s to study opera at the University of Fine Arts, Raabe came up with a novel way to finance his studies. Along with some fellow students, he formed a band to play the music of the 1920s and 1930s that so dearly enchanted him. Pillaging flea markets for vintage sheet music, Raabe and his cohorts amassed a repertoire of historical arrangements. (Many of the musicians who started with Raabe in his student days are still with the band.)

What might have been started on a lark gained traction, first in Germany and Austria, then elsewhere in Europe.

"My parents were scared," Raabe said of his early professional forays with the Palast Orchester. "My mother still wanted me to be an opera singer."

It was while building momentum in Europe through relentless touring and multiple recordings that Raabe and the orchestra made a bit of an artistic detour, releasing 1920s-esque covers of contemporary pop songs like Tom Jones' "Sex Bomb" and Britney Spears' "Oops! ... I Did It Again."

"It was a joke; it was funny for our audience," he said of the venture. "But Fraulein Spears lost the chance to figure out the irony and black humor in 'Oops! ... I Did It Again.'"