By JOSEPH DALTON, Spe­cial to the Times Union

First pub­lished in print: Thurs­day, August 13, 2009

If you think string quar­tets and vio­lin sonatas are no laugh­ing mat­ter, meet Igudes­man and Joo, the clas­si­cal music com­edy duo from Great Britain.

A cou­ple of con­ser­va­tory grads in their 30s, Alek­sey Igudes­man, a vio­lin­ist, and Richard Hyung-ki Joo, a pianist, are the irrev­er­ent suc­ces­sors to Vic­tor Borge and P.D.Q. Bach. Mix­ing beloved themes of Mozart, Beethoven and oth­ers with a Monty-Python-style phys­i­cal humor, they’ve taken Europe by storm over the last four years and earned the respect of such deeply seri­ous artists as Gideon Kre­mer and Emanuel Ax. But typ­i­cal of musi­cians of their gen­er­a­tion, they’ve found their largest audi­ence online. YouTube videos of their con­cert antics have gar­nered more than 14 mil­lion hits.

Igudes­man and Joo made their Amer­i­can debut ear­lier this year, and they’re bring­ing their show, “A Lit­tle Night­mare Music,” to the Saratoga Cham­ber Music Fes­ti­val on Sun­day after­noon and to the Coop­er­stown Cham­ber Music Fes­ti­val on Tues­day night.

“I am first and fore­most a clas­si­cal musi­cian. I don’t pre­tend to be any­thing else.” says Joo, a grad­u­ate of the Man­hat­tan School of Music. “The rea­son I do ‘A Lit­tle Night­mare Music’ is because I’m so pas­sion­ate about clas­si­cal music.”

While he’s spend­ing an increas­ing amount of time clown­ing around onstage, Joo has also per­formed con­cer­tos with the Lon­don and Royal Phil­har­mon­ics and even played a Beethoven vio­lin sonata with Yehudi Menuhin, the late star of the vio­lin. The duo met at England’s Menuhin School, where they became friends in their early teens.

“One of our biggest influ­ences was the school’s name­sake,” Joo says. “Menuhin was not just one of the great­est vio­lin­ists of all time but maybe also the first crossover artist, col­lab­o­rat­ing with Stephan Grap­pelli, Duke Elling­ton and Ravi Shanker. He was a human­i­tar­ian and very open-minded in how music was to be shared.”

In addi­tion to get­ting advanced instruc­tion on their instru­ments, both musi­cians also stud­ied com­po­si­tion at the con­ser­va­tory, where they were pushed to find their own musi­cal voices. Lit­tle did their teach­ers know that com­edy would be their reoc­cur­ring motif. Joo says that Great Britain is teem­ing with com­edy, but he also cites as an influ­ence exis­ten­tial the­ater, like Becket’s “Wait­ing for Godot.”

“We always had a dream to make clas­si­cal music acces­si­ble to a wider and younger audi­ence, to take out the snob­bism and elit­ism, and to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment where peo­ple are not afraid to go to con­certs,” Joo says. “We were also fas­ci­nated by humor or the­ater within music, and we real­ized that (com­edy in the con­cert hall) was an art form that doesn’t exist in the dic­tio­nary but cer­tainly works.”

As with the Cap­i­tal Region’s own P.D.Q. Bach, Igudes­man and Joo seek to cre­ate rou­tines that speak to both the musi­cal lay­man and the con­sum­mate insider. “For clas­si­cal musi­cians, he’s a gem,” Joo says of Woodstock’s composer/humorist Peter Schick­ele, aka P.D.Q. Bach. “One of my favorite things of his was a Beethoven sym­phony with football-style com­men­tary. … It’s an almost per­fect analy­sis of the piece but done with sports ter­mi­nol­ogy. That’s what we try to do: to write on each level so that those who have never heard Beethoven can appre­ci­ate what it is and oth­ers can also have an insight.”

Cos­tumes, props, voice-overs, singing and musi­cal ref­er­ences to pop­u­lar cul­ture all play a part in an evening with Igudes­man and Joo. But beneath it all, there’s a deep respect for the music, if not the stuffy tra­di­tions that sur­round it.

“We’re very care­ful that we don’t make fun of music; we make fun with music, and that’s an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion for us,” says Joo.

Joo says he thinks it was pianist Martha Arg­erich who rec­om­mended them to vio­lin­ist Chantel Juil­let, artis­tic direc­tor of the Saratoga Cham­ber Music Festival.

Yet it’s the new­com­ers and the returnees to clas­si­cal music that they most want to win over.

“We have a lot of peo­ple, kids and adults, who after com­ing to our shows have resumed their stud­ies or have started pick­ing up an instru­ment,” says Joo. “They’ve also gone out to buy CDs or tick­ets to operas and concerts.”

And for that, every clas­si­cal music lover can be grateful.

A local free­lance writer, Joseph Dal­ton is the author of “Artists & Activists: Mak­ing Cul­ture in New York’s Cap­i­tal Region.”