Led On A Murray Dance

- Russell Baillie

Bill Murray has added another string to his bow. To do it, he needed a different kind of bow – this one in the hand of world-renowned German cellist Jan Vogler.

The pair released the album New Worlds in 2017, with Murray singing and reading mostly American literature to chamber music performed by a three-piece ensemble of Vogler, his virtuoso-violinist wife Mira Wang and Venezuelan pianist Vanessa Perez. The quartet have spent much of the last year on a tour that will end up in Wellington in November.

Murray and Vogler are certainly an odd couple: Murray is a veteran screen comic whose irreverent style has won him an international cult following; Vogler, a 54-year-old East Berlin-born, New York resident chamber musician, who has played as a soloist with major orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic.

They met in the first-class cabin on a flight to Berlin where Murray was making the George Clooney movie The Monuments Men. Vogler invited Murray to a concert in Dresden and they struck up a friendship, which eventually became a musical collaboration.

“He had a huge cello on the seat next to him, and we started talking,” Murray tells the Listener while attending the Berlin Film Festival premiere for director Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, in which he voices one of the pooches.

“I invited him to a poetry reading I do in New York, then I went to a few of his shows and we decided to do something together.”