IGUDESMAN & JOO — A unique collaboration

Alek­sey Igudes­man and Hyung-ki Joo are two clas­si­cal musi­cians who have taken the world by storm with their unique and hilar­i­ous the­atri­cal shows, which com­bine com­edy with clas­si­cal music and pop­u­lar cul­ture. Their clips on YouTube, to date, have gath­ered over 15 mil­lion hits, and they have appeared live on tele­vi­sion in    sev­eral coun­tries, includ­ing an exclu­sive inter­view for CNN. Equally com­fort­able per­form­ing in clas­si­cal con­cert halls, as well as in sta­di­ums in front of crowds of 18,000, their uni­fied dream is to make clas­si­cal music acces­si­ble to a wider and younger audience.

Alek­sey and Hyung-ki met at the age of twelve, at the Yehudi Menuhin School, in Eng­land, and since then, have remained strong friends and writ­ing part­ners. In 2004, fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of lumi­nar­ies such as Vic­tor Borge and Dud­ley Moore, they cre­ated their first ground­break­ing show, “A Lit­tle Night­mare Music”. Since then, they have per­formed with major sym­phony orches­tras around the world and have played at some of the world’s biggest stages and festivals.

Many of clas­si­cal music’s biggest names, such as Emanuel Ax, Janine Jansen, Gidon Kre­mer, Mis­cha Maisky, Vik­to­ria Mullova, and Julian Rach­lin, have joined them in their zany musi­cal sketches, and recently, they per­formed exclu­sively for one of clas­si­cal music’s great­est con­duc­tors, Bernard Haitink, who there­after said, “Igudes­man and Joo played at my 80th birth­day cel­e­bra­tions. I nearly died laugh­ing. I’d like to invite them back for my 85th, but that might be con­sid­ered reckless…Great musi­cians, great fun.”

Their per­for­mances reach well out­side of the clas­si­cal field and last year they toured Europe with leg­ends of the pop world such as Robin Gibb (Bee Gees), Midge Ure (Ultra­vox and co-creator of Live Aid and Band Aid), Tears for Fears, Sim­ple Minds, and Kim Wilde.

Indi­vid­u­ally, Alek­sey Igudes­man has worked with musi­cians rang­ing from Acad­emy® Award win­ning Hol­ly­wood com­poser, Hans Zim­mer, to multi Grammy® Award win­ning vocal­ist, Bobby McFer­rin. Hyung-ki Joo, has worked with Acad­emy® Award win­ning com­poser, Van­ge­lis, and was cho­sen by Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Billy Joel, to arrange and record Joel’s clas­si­cal com­po­si­tions on a CD, which reached no.1 on the Bill­board Charts. Alek­sey and Hyung-ki have also col­lab­o­rated with the actor, Roger Moore, on sev­eral occa­sions for UNICEF.

In 2010, the Ger­man TV Broad­cast­ing Chan­nel, ZDF, aired Igudes­man & Joo’s doc­u­men­tary, or rather “Mock­u­men­tary”, titled “Every­thing You Always Wanted to Know About Clas­si­cal Music”

ALEKSEY IGUDESMAN

Alek­sey Igudes­man was born in Leningrad at a very young age. He has never won any                com­pe­ti­tions, mainly because he has never entered any. Dur­ing his stud­ies at the pres­ti­gious Yehudi Menuhin School, he read the entire plays of Bern­hard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Anton Chekhov, which didn’t improve his vio­lin play­ing, but made him feel fool­ishly some­what supe­rior to other less intel­lec­tu­ally endowed, yet harder prac­tis­ing, colleagues.

After study­ing with Boris Kuschnir at the Vienna Con­ser­va­toire and being told many times by many peo­ple that they were rather wor­ried about his future, he embarked on a suc­cess­ful career play­ing, com­pos­ing, and arrang­ing for his string trio, “Tri­ol­ogy”, record­ing sev­eral CD’s for BMG, work­ing in Hol­ly­wood with Acad­emy Award® win­ner Hans Zim­mer, and per­forming with Bobby McFer­rin, Julian Rach­lin, Janine Jansen, Roger Moore and other peo­ple who are less famous, but just as great.

Alek­sey Igudes­man writes a lot of music. Often he goes to bed writ­ing and gets up writ­ing. He some­times feels a lit­tle inse­cure about his music, although it is pub­lished by Uni­ver­sal Edi­tion, and tries to com­pen­sate for it by being rather extro­vert. In fact, his psy­chi­a­trist tells him that he is inse­cure about a lot of things. Alek­sey is not so sure about that.

Back at school he met his “IGUDESMAN & JOO” part­ner, Richard Hyung-ki Joo. After a few ini­tial small dif­fer­ences, result­ing in sev­eral peo­ple hold­ing them both back from smash­ing chairs and music stands on each other’s heads, Joo offered Igudes­man some fish and chips, which he sim­ply could not refuse. This in turn led to col­lab­o­ra­tion over many years, which cul­mi­nated in the cre­ation of “A Lit­tle Night­mare Music”, a show they tour together mak­ing people laugh.

After Gidon Kre­mer heard them sev­eral times, he wanted to join in the fun, so to speak. After a while Vik­to­ria Mullova, Emanuel Ax, Mar­tin Fröst, Felic­ity Lott and sev­eral other flash musi­cians also felt like a good laugh, but this is a story for another day…

Alek­sey Igudes­man plays on a Santo Seraphin vio­lin from the year 1717, which is kindly loaned to him by ERSTE BANK.

www.alekseyigudesman.com

HYUNG-KI JOO

Hyung-ki Joo was born. He is British, but looks Korean, or the other way around, or both. He showed his first signs of a sense of com­edy whilst nappy-changing and shortly there­after, showed his love for music when his par­ents would find him at the record store lis­ten­ing for hours to every­thing from Mozart to Bee Gees. (Although the two are never to be con­fused, Hyung-ki is often heard singing “Don Gio­vanni” in the style of Barry Gibb).

He started piano lessons at the age of eight and a half and two years later won a place at the Yehudi Menuhin School. There, he dis­cov­ered that he was among geniuses and child prodi­gies and was con­vinced he would be kicked out of school, year after year. In fact, he was not kicked “out” but kicked “around” by teach­ers and fel­low stu­dents, such as Alek­sey Igudes­man. After these painful expe­ri­ences, Joo invented a new type of piano play­ing known as “Karate Piano”. No mat­ter how dif­fi­cult his years at the school may have been, it only strength­ened his love of music, and he also realised that the world of clas­si­cal music had lit­tle to do with the spirit in which the music was cre­ated and began dream­ing of a way to bring this great music to a wider and newer audi­ence– a dream which has recently been realised through his show: “A Lit­tle Nightmare Music”.

Hyung-ki, spelt R-I-C-H-A-R-D, and pro­nounced “Dick”, is the only Korean Jew, (spelt J-O-O) in the world. Hyung-ki has small hands, (but only hands small), and there­fore finds some piano reper­toire quite dif­fi­cult to play, such as the music of Rach­mani­nov, who had Big Hands. Any­way, even with this small hin­drance, he hap­pily per­forms cham­ber music, recitals, con­cer­tos, his own com­po­si­tions, and any­thing else that includes a piano part.

Besides per­form­ing, com­pos­ing, laugh­ing, brush­ing his teeth at mer­cu­r­ial speed, and writ­ing com­edy with his long time friend and duo part­ner, Alek­sey Igudes­man, Joo’s pas­sion for teach­ing has led him to develop a per­sonal style of work­shop, enti­tled “The Inner and Outer ***** for a Musi­cian”, which aims to encour­age and inspire young musi­cians to expe­ri­ence music and life as a musi­cian, from dif­fer­ent perspectives.

“Stun­ning to hear in con­cert– he is a vir­tu­oso” PAUL SIMON