Igudesman & Joo: A Little Nightmare Music

Where parody infiltrates the music;

Aleksey Igudesman on the violin and Hyung-ki Joo on the piano, performing at the Rialto theatre. The world-renowned performers bring the ups and downs to the music with great mastery to create parody and travesty to known musical works, showing the dark side of classical music and more!

Aleksey Igudesman was born in Leningrad at a very young age. 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, Sir Roger Moore, John Malkovich, 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. Back at school he met his “IGUDESMAN & JOO” partner, 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. Aleksey Igudesman plays with a bow made by the Boston based bowmaker, Benoit Roland, and on a Santo Seraphin violin from the year 1717, which is kindly loaned to him by ERSTE BANK.

Hyung-ki Joo is British, but looks Korean, or the other way around, or both! He showed his first signs of a sense of comedy from a very young age together with his love for music when his parents would find him at the record storelistening for hours to everything from Mozart to Bee Gees. He started piano lessons at the age of eight and a half and two years later won a place at the Yehudi Menuhin School. 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 so began dreaming of a way to bring this great music to a wider and newer audience– a dream which has been realised through his show: “IGUDESMAN & JOO: A Little Nightmare Music”. He happily performs chamber music, recitals, concertos, his own compositions, and anything else that includes a piano part.

Besides composing, performing, laughing, brushing his teeth at breakneck speed and writing comedy, Joo’s passion for teaching has led him to develop his own personal style of workshops.