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 from the 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. 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 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”.

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 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.