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TAGES ANZEIGER: The Freddie Factor
by Jean-Martin Büttner
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Queen in the indoor stadium with Adam Lambert in the place of Freddie Mercury: it works. If you let him.

Queen, which was the daring name of an English hard rock quartet eccentric academics, which sold hundreds of millions of records and dozens wrote songs that still everybody knows today; not self-evident in this genre. The quartet has halved in the nineties to Duo, but acted thus two problems a. The first is negligible and is called John Deacon, the former bass player who did not believe in the resuscitation of his former colleagues and consistently retired from business in 1997. Deacon was an excellent musician and songwriter, but who looks forward to the bass player? The second problem seemed unsolvable, however: It was said Freddie Mercury, who died in 1991 of complications from HIV infection, one of the first prominent victims of the disease.

Mercury remains memorable, unforgettable, irreplaceable. With a wonderful voice, his humor, his charisma and his demonstratively presented homosexuality with which he entertained the homophobic hard rock audience in short white pants and erect microphone stand equally and provoked. He was much less impressed with his art than his audience of millions. The songs his band are like Kleenex, he said, if required tangible and discarded after use. What would be left of his art, asked by a journalist. "I do not give a fuck, darling," he replied, "because then I'll be dead."

The fan in the center of the stage

Mercury is dead, Deacon is gone, and the rest plays at the Hallenstadion with assorted guest musicians and the repertoire of a long career. And from the very first of nearly thirty pieces presented, "One Vision" from the comeback album "A Kind of Magic" from 1986, we can say: music, song and performance thunder as newly composed on the system.

And not in spite of the American guest singer Adam Lambert, who has assumed the impossible task of taking on Mercury's office, but because of him. "Let us celebrate the reason why we fell in love with this band," the 33-year-old once said, and he himself celebrates most of all: as unrestrained fan who he is. Finally, the singer with Mercury's "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the talent show "American Idol" debuted and emerged. "No one can replace Freddie Mercury," he has said in interviews. He does the next best thing: he can live it up without denying himself.

Gay Winnetou

Queen had already tried a comeback in the new millennium with the English rock singer Paul Rodgers. It failed because Rodgers lacked everything Mercury possessed about his fantastic voice out in excess: Grandezza, flash Diventum, pathos and irony, tuntenhaftes Posing In other words: Freddie Mercury was uninhibited gay, gay as Thomas Mann and Winnetou together.

Also, it was the uniqueness of this band: they intoned heterosexual music with a gay singer. Under the direction of their masculinity parody was installed.

The rousing finale

With the exalted Adam Lambert this combination is restored, "the Freddie-Factor", as the "Guardian" has been called, and he makes the most of this two and a half hour, including the audience singing along throughout the entire concert.

More, the appearance on Thursday succeeds whenever Lambert is expended on center stage when it shines with songs like "Another One Bites the Dust", "Killer Queen" or "Tie Your Mother Down" in several octaves and with the shameless, composed to the stadium concert encores "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions" a furious finale burns.

Thundering boredom

Why still remains a residual disappointment, why do not succeed the whole episode? Because Queen repeat the same mistake already subverted them in July 1986 at the Hallenstadion, and then Mercury was still in the process: the remaining founding members are swayed by their vanity. And assume the worst excesses of the sixties - a long solos, cut and thresh on guitar and drums, booming bombast and boredom. When guitarist Brian May "Love of My Life" intones alone on acoustic guitar, while Mercury fills behind him than life canvas has the somewhat humbling, and it takes the player the tears that he must wipe afterwards. But when he and drummer Roger Taylor go through the size of the self, one waits only for the fact that their self-esteem subsides again and good music is played. Regretfully, one thinks about what pieces for the band still could play. And wishing that the musicians had their talent more familiar than their representation engines.

Nevertheless, and even comforting about these escapades of time: On stage, musicians play together with obvious pleasure, and there is nothing better on a concert, as if the audience can share his enthusiasm with those who are concerned about this. For Kleenex tissues are finally there: as stoffliches equivalent physical vehemence.