Hands-On: The A. Lange & Söhne Cabaret Tourbillon In Honeygold

Niche Lange collectors, rejoice! The Cabaret is back! Well, sort of. Today, on this fine Saturday, Lange has brought back the Cabaret in its complicated form, with a 50-piece run of the Cabaret Tourbillon in the brand’s proprietary Honeygold alloy. It is a hefty block of grey and Honeygold, with this rectangular silhouette making its first appearance after a 30-piece handwerskskunst run in 2021. The price point, like many of the past Cabaret Tourbillon editions, sits in the mid-six-figure range at around €300,000.

When the Cabaret Tourbillon was first introduced to the world in 2008, it was quite horologically impressive, adding the world’s first hacking tourbillon into the brand’s rectangular design from 1997. It might sound quite surprising that a hacking tourbillon had not been produced until 2008, but being able to stop such a large mass like a tourbillon cage is certainly not an easy feat, especially when you require delicate parts to do so, and with the need to navigate around the tourbillon cage itself. After all, you’d need to be able to stop the cage at any orientation it’s in, and at any point in the balance wheel’s oscillation.

So Lange’s movement designers set to work and devised a V-shaped spring that would directly halt the balance wheel—not the tourbillon cage. Its V-shape, centered around a rotating pivot at the end of a lever, would mean that one side would make contact with the balance wheel or tourbillon cage post, and pivot the other side of the V into place to stop the mechanism at two points. The direct braking of the balance wheel means that the balance spring’s energy is stored at the balance wheel’s current position, so when the crown is pushed back in after the time is set and the V-shaped spring releases the balance wheel, that stored energy can provide an impulse to the wheel to bring it back into its oscillating motion. This is because, in theory, there is a perfect position where the balance wheel is stopped at the center of its oscillation and thus needs an external impulse to get going, but the probability of that is slim.

Following the debut of the Cabaret Tourbillon, the V-shaped spring would make its way into the 1815 Tourbillon introduced in 2014, which marked the debut of the world’s first hacking and zero-reset tourbillon. On that watch, the hacking spring was combined with a heart-and-cam system that reset the seconds hand on the tourbillon back to zero when the crown was pulled out. But I digress—let’s get back to the Cabaret Tourbillon.

The rectangular Honeygold case measures 29.5mm in width, 39.2mm in length, and 10.3mm in height. I suppose calling it just a rectangular case is a bit reductive, as there is some additional complexity in the way the lugs add some additional dimension to the corners of the case. You’ve heard me wax poetic about Honeygold many times in the past, but the brand’s proprietary alloy is kind of my perfect gold, acting as a chameleon in different lights from a pale shade of straw to an occasionally warm rose hue. Add on the fact that it’s actually harder than platinum, and it’s kind of a win all around. While the brand has often touted its extreme difficulty to machine (thanks to its hardness and reactivity), it hasn’t shied away from the material in recent years. Just last year, we saw multiple releases in Honeygold, and I do think the brand needs to pull back on its frequency of use to maintain its visual and metaphorical allure.

In this Cabaret Tourbillon, however, Lange literally doubles down on the material with the inclusion of a dial also made out of Honeygold. In contrast to many of Lange’s dials, this one is actually made in-house, joining the company of handwerskunst and grand feu enamel dials. As we’ve seen in other special editions, such as the Tourbograph Perpetual “Homage to F.A. Lange” in Honeygold, much of the dial decoration is part of the dial itself rather than applied. Yes, the Roman numerals, diamond-shaped hour markers, and the frame for the outsized date are applied, but decorations like the raised lines of the dial, the brand’s logo, and the markings of the small seconds and power reserve subdials are actually raised 0.15 millimeters out of the base material.

You’ll notice that this isn’t a “handwerkskunst” watch, which implies that these lines and markings aren’t actually engraved in relief by hand. Rather, the negative space is machined out via precise machining. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of handwork going into the making of this dial at the Glashütte manufacture. Following the machining, the dials are black rhodiumed, creating that grainy, dark grey hue, and then the raised elements are finished by hand to reveal the hue of Honeygold hiding behind that grey. The large cutout at six o’clock, sitting underneath and between the two subdials (forming, as I’ve heard people say, the silhouette of Mickey Mouse), reveals a sixty-second hacking tourbillon suspended by a triangular bridge. The bridge, as well as the top of the tourbillon cage, is black polished. A closer look at the tourbillon cage itself shows a few sharp interior angles. Last but not least are two diamond endstones capping each side of the tourbillon pivot, able to be seen on both the front and back.

The result is something very alluring, allowing for a delicateness to the raised lines and markings that otherwise would not be able to be achieved via conventionally applied elements. It’s a tried-and-true high-end dial execution from the brand, and reminds the wearer that the dial itself is indeed also Honeygold.

There is no external pusher for the outsized date on the Cabaret Tourbillon, which may prove annoying. Let’s face it, if you’re picking up one of these, chances are you probably have a lot of watches in your collection. So even leaving it unworn for many days means you need a stylus (or a toothpick) to quickly advance that date via the recessed pusher next to the crown. It feels like a bit of a shortcoming on a watch like this, especially when the date is so prominently featured on the dial, but then again, it’s been a consistent design choice that stems from the very first Cabaret reference introduced in 1997. I assume that if Lange ever brought back the Cabaret line in a new generation, we may see the date adjustable through an external pusher or through the crown.

Turn the ingot of Honeygold around, and you’ll see the manually-wound, fully shaped rectangular caliber L042.1 on display. I’m so used to seeing round three-quarter plates from the brand that it took my brain a bit of time to reconcile what I was seeing here, but, shape aside, everything else feels very familiar in the finish when it comes to the untreated German silver plates. The winding gears are revealed in the plate’s cutouts, while gold chatons show a visual trail of the watch’s gear train as it traverses across the caliber. At the bottom (or left, if you’re reading the engraved text in its upright orientation), sit two hand-engraved cocks for the tourbillon cage and intermediate wheel. Twin mainspring barrels offer a very impressive 120 hours of power reserve.

The Cabaret isn’t for everyone, even for the die-hard Lange enthusiasts out there. It’s probably the reason why models like the original were never a huge commercial success, and the reason why we don’t see a Cabaret in the standard collection these days. But when it comes to the Cabaret Tourbillon, the big sticking point, if you do find yourself lucky to be cross-shopping at this multi-six-figure price point, is that this watch wears very large. Now, I’ll be honest here – I had maybe an hour with the watch, so I didn’t get to spend an extended amount of time wearing it around. But my immediate impression was that this was a large watch, and despite my self-assessed ability to handle round Lange designs even up to the 44mm of the Zeitwerk Date on my flat 6.5″ wrist, the Cabaret Tourbillon felt a bit extreme.

I think there are a few reasons why. The obvious is that any rectangular watch is going to look and wear larger. Since the Cabaret Tourbillon is wider in proportion than the classic Cabaret, the dial side shows off much more surface area. And while most of the time I’ll praise short lugs for improving the wearability of a round watch, I think they amplify the 10.3mm case height here. Finally, the new, non-broken-in strap certainly didn’t help, and I’d assume I’d find a better experience with wearing it on a softer or thicker strap. All in all, this is to say that on the Cabaret Tourbillon, more than most other Langes I’ve tried in recent memory, your mileage will truly vary. It’s a watch that desperately needs to be tried on in person, and no amount of words here will be able to convey these dimensions on the wrist.

Wearability aside, the Cabaret Tourbillon in Honeygold is still a wonderfully deep-cut example of complicated watchmaking from A. Lange & Söhne, and this very Lange execution also deserves a look in person. It is not often that we get to see this black-rhodiumed Honeygold treatment for Lange’s dials, and with the work required to produce each one (the brand says each one takes several weeks to produce, from a logistics and craft standpoint), there’s no doubt why these are rare. It’s also nice to see such a niche design make a brief return to the spotlight, as it certainly offers a refreshing balance to something like the Lumen’s much broader commercial appeal. The Cabaret Tourbillon continues to be a downright weird watch, and I mean that in the most positive sense of the term.

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