“In fact I built two, and another one for Australia. “We constructed a full-scale replica of the imperial palace – it was the largest touring stage set in the world,” he says. One evening in 2008, after a concert in front of the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, Rieu decided it would be marvellous to play in front of such a spectacular backdrop every night. And there’s nothing we love more in this little country than beating the Germans.” As the platinum awards tumbled in, Rieu’s vision became increasingly grandiose. How might it have influenced his career, I wonder, if Ajax had lost? “I don’t know,” he laughs, “but sometimes you need these pieces of luck. Ajax did me a huge favour and scored just before half time. I knew that there was a big European game coming up, Ajax against Bayern Munich, so I bought a minute of live TV coverage during the break. “At the time an insurance company had used the Shostakovich piece for a television commercial and at the last second I decided to put it on the album. “We had just finished our first major recording,” Rieu says. One of his most-viewed YouTube clips shows the violinist leading several thousand Ajax fans in a sing-along of Shostakovich’s hummable – though hardly well-known – Waltz No 2, for the 1995 Champions League final.Īndré Rieu serenades football fans in 1995 Having rejected the life of a conventional soloist, it was fitting that Rieu’s big break should occur not on the concert platform, but the centre circle of a football pitch. It made him very rich, but he was a fantastic musician, so what is so wrong about that?” “He proved that it is possible to be a businessman as well as a musician – I have only one orchestra, he had five. In 1987 Rieu renamed his band the Johann Strauss Orchestra in honour of his idol, Johann Strauss II. If you ordered that, I would come out of the kitchen and play at the table – but then I realised that I would have to start practising again.” We had menu cards printed up: the most expensive item was going to be the Pizza Paganini. So we thought that we might open a pizza restaurant. Marjorie was studying languages and she was fed up too. “I founded my first orchestra in 1978 with just 12 musicians and we played for weddings, restaurants, anywhere we could get a booking, and we were always ignored. “There was a time when I felt like putting my violin away for good,” he says. Billboard figures indicate that Rieu’s 2014 world tour outsold Metallica, Ed Sheeran, Rod Stewart and Beyoncé while his annual summer concert from Maastricht’s medieval town square was broadcast live to cinemas this year, becoming the first concert film to take more than £1m at the box office in a single day, beating previous records set by One Direction and Take That.Įven though Rieu’s father was a conductor who led the Maastricht Symphony Orchestra, following in the family business wasn’t always easy. He did – over 40 million at the last count, firmly establishing him as the biggest-selling classical musician in the world. She said, ‘In that case you had better sell some records.’” But later I told my wife Marjorie that I should like to own it. It was dark and damp and practically falling down. I first came here for piano lessons when I was six years old – the teacher was a total bitch and I hated her. He is tall, remarkably well-preserved for his 66 years, and dressed in a navy bespoke suit, red silk tie and shiny silver boots that look as if they might have been purchased in anticipation of his oft-stated ambition to become the first musician to perform on the moon.Ī Christmassy get-together at André Rieu’s castle. Rieu strides into his drawing room at precisely the appointed time. It seems only natural that the man at the heart of this elaborate fairytale should live in a castle: Rieu inhabits a 17th-century chateau with its own butterfly house and a coat of arms belonging to a previous occupant, Charles de Batz-Castelmore d’Artagnan – the inspiration for Alexandre Dumas’s fictional musketeer, who died at the siege of Maastricht in 1673. There are still pieces of the polyester avalanche filling my pockets when I meet Rieu a couple of days later at his home in Maastricht. And the concert is subject to a strange microclimate of its own, with sudden downpours of balloons and flurries of fake snow that takes some shaking off afterwards. Referring to the howling gales outside, he introduces the Skater’s Waltz as “the perfect piece of music for your Irish shit weather”. Rieu is, in case there is any doubt, an extremely fine violinist with a seductively plush tone and a stage persona that turns out to be surprisingly relaxed and informal.
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