The Waltz King or the Schmaltz King? That’s the question that hovers around Andre Rieu, the soon-to-be 60-year-old violinist and one of the most well-known classical music figures in the world.

Many classical music purists hold their nose when it comes to Rieu and his glitzy arena concerts, which are heavy on light waltzes and pop hits; however, the portion of the public that probably can’t say whether Beethoven is a late classicist or an early romanticist has thrown open its arms to Rieu. He’s sold an estimated 24 million records worldwide, and was named one of the 10 top touring acts in the world by Pollstar, the concert industry trade magazine.

“I have so many people that write me after they’ve been to my concert, saying that they didn’t know classical music could be so much fun,” Rieu said by e-mail from Australia earlier this week. “People love the fact that they are able to show emotions during my concert, that they can laugh, cry and dance at the same time.”

Just a few days after Yanni and a few days before Bruce Springsteen, Rieu and his 60-piece Johann Strauss Orchestra will be at Mellon Arena Sunday night. An almost-constant presence on the road, it’s estimated that he performs before 700,000 people every year. Rieu’s programs also are hits during pledge drives on PBS television stations, just as the Three Tenors extravaganzas were more than a decade ago.

“The Three Tenors opened up classical music to a bigger audience,” Rieu explained. “Their goal, just like mine, (was) to show people that classical music is for everybody, young or old, educated or not educated. You just need to feel with your heart.”

Though he’s known for blurring the line between highbrow and pop, Rieu’s musical upbringing was fairly conventional. The son of a conductor, the man born Andre Leon Marie Nicolas Rieu in Maastricht, the Netherlands, studied the violin at conservatories and academies in his home country and in Brussels and assumed a spot as a violinist with the Limburg Symphony Orchestra in his hometown.

But Rieu eventually grew bored with the conventions of symphony work and struck out on his own. He put together the Johann Strauss Orchestra in 1987 and started touring Europe. Waltzes were their specialty, and Rieu played the violin while conducting, just as Strauss did. Working at a feverish pace, Rieu has released more than 30 CDs and DVDs in the last two decades.

According to Rieu, “There is so much beautiful music that we haven’t played yet, that we haven’t recorded yet, we could go on for another 300 years!”

A review of a Rieu concert in Australia’s Adelaide Advertiser last November described Rieu as a “laconic, beaming Svengali impressing his absolute authority on the proceedings, a musical iron fist in a velvet glove.” It also stated, “This was not exactly a concert of classical music, as frequently observed, but more a celebration of music for the broad community based around the waltz and its off-shoots …”

On the other hand, another critic for the same newspaper dismissed Rieu six months earlier, contending his repertoire “is limited largely to schmaltz and sentimentality. His orchestra plays threadbare arrangements carefully crafted so as to not upstage the star.”

But whether you think Rieu is a superior musician or an insubstantial huckster, there’s no question that he does his job with some of the best equipment available. He plays a 1732 Stradivarius violin, which he describes as “more mature” than a 1667 Stradivarius he used previously. A newspaper in Sydney, Australia reported last week that it even has its own bodyguard.

“I see myself as the caretaker of this violin until the next person has the privilege of taking care of it.”

by: Brad Hundt