“Hyung-ki Joo is the perfect chamber-music pianist, one who is perfectly balanced with his colleagues and who has an imaginative response to the music he plays without drawing attention to himself.” – Classical Source
Pianist, composer, chamber musician, conductor, teacher and YouTube sensation Hyung-ki Joo started piano lessons at the age of eight and a quarter, 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 the school. In the end, he was never kicked out but teachers and fellow students, such as Aleksey Igudesman, did kick him around in various parts of his anatomy, making the future of any offspring rather bleak. No matter how difficult those seven years at the school may have been, it only strengthened his love of music, and a while after graduation, he was chosen by Yehudi Menuhin himself to perform as soloist for his eightieth birthday concert at the Barbican Hall, London. He says that his musical life would be incomplete without chamber music.
«The first morning when I woke up at the Yehudi Menuhin School, at the age of 10 years old, I thought I was in paradise. All I could hear around me was music – Haydn String Quartets, Beethoven Piano Trios, Brahms Sextets. Of course, at the time, I had no idea what these pieces were called, but I soon discovered it was something called Chamber Music and over the next seven years, it became a part of my daily existence.» – Hyung-ki Joo