From Mozart to madness: five great videos of comedy crossover ‘classical’ music quartets
Salut Salon from Germany and the Vienna-based Janoska Ensemble are among several top international groups offering a lighter side to classical music in Hong Kong
As both the all-female Salut Salon from Germany and the all-male Vienna-based Janoska Ensemble make their debuts in Hong Kong next month, it’s a perfect time for looking at top classically trained music quartets where the music crosses over, does somersaults in the air and puts the “improv” into improvisation, the vaudeville into Vaughan Williams. Here are five of the best comedy quartets on the circuit right now – and, interestingly, each is either four women or four men. There are few mixed ensembles, apparently in the very specialised world of quartet comedy.
Two members of this all-women group from Germany went to school with each other, and at the age of about eight were already famous around their campus for collapsing into howls of laughter as they spoofed through music rehearsals with their classmates. They kept on goofing. By 2016, France’s Le Figaro newspaper praised them as “the most unusual and hilarious women’s quartet in the realm of classical music”. Their Competitive Foursome, in which they mash competitively through a medley, playing violins and cello and even the piano upside down has had more than 22 million views on YouTube, and counting.
In their two performances in Hong Kong’s Sha Tin Town Hall (October 21) and YuenLong Theatre (October 22) they will do a comic take on Camille Saint-Saens’ A Carnival of the Animals as well as Rimsky-Korsakov’s well known The Flight of the Bumblebee and Astor Piazzola’s less well known Shark. If you google “acrobatics and classical music” you mostly get links to Salut Salon; and the evening promised includes musical fantasies and comedy as well assome impressive virtuoso playing.
Also making their Hong Kong appearance this year are the three Janoska brothers, originally from Bratislava, Slovak Republic: Roman (who won the Pressler Paganini Prize for violin); Ondrej (former first violin in the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and Vienna Philharmonic); and Frantisek who was the pianist of the Roby Lakatos Ensemble and won the International Franz Liszt Piano Competition in Hungary, together with their brother-in-law Julius Darvas, who plays double bass with them, when he isn’t performing in the Vienna State Opera orchestra. In Paganinoska (based on Caprice No.24 and the finale of their Hong Kong appearance at Tsuen Wan Town Hall on October 28),
they imagine what kind of music the 19th-century sensation Nicolo Paganini would be inventing if he was living today. Something very fast, very Roma, and very amusing.
