Making fool of themselves has long become second nature for this eccentric duo, Igudesman and Joo. A Little Nightmare Music, just presented in Moscow, is their ode to fun.
“He is my pain. That’s why we do the show, A Little Nightmare Music. Actually, he caused me a lot of pain when I was young. He used to beat me up. This is absolutely true. I wanted him to stop beating me up so I offered him some food. Some fish and chips. If we were in Russia I would have given him some pelmeni. But we are in England. He took the fish and chips and stopped hitting me and we became great friends. Then we started plotting Little Nightmare Music,” Hyung-ki Joo says.
A day without laugher is a day wasted for the virtuoso Russian violinist and the Korean pianist – the pair met in England at the age of twelve at the Yehudi Menuhin School, and since then have been inseparable comic partners.
They have a reputation for mixing classical and pop music tunes like clowns juggling oranges.
“We don’t make fun of the music, we make fun with the music because we love the music that we play,”
Aleksey Igudesman explains.
Their laugh-a-minute clips on YouTube have already attracted up to 30 million hits featuring Igudesman and Joo mixing Mozart symphonies with themes from Bond movies.
At their gigs, expect the unexpected. A-list actors and musicians such as Sir Roger Moore, John Malkovich and Gidon Kremer have joined them in their musical sketches.
“We haven’t just performed with classical musicians. We’ve also had rock musicians perform with us. Recently we played at Carnegie Hall and Billy Joel joined us on stage. And also we’ve done stuff with actors, with John Malkovich, for example. They Everybody wants to be a child. With us it’s very easy to be a child, because serious people wouldn’t do this. And we can.”
Valeria Paikova, RT