Laughter is the best medicine: Rainer Hersch on his fusion of comedy and classical

Throughout my formative years I developed two parallel interests. The first was a love of classical music. The key to that door was Swiss pianist Alfred Cortot’s 1933 recordings of the Chopin Études, which my step-dad introduced me to. I couldn’t believe how much beauty and emotion could be contained in the music and started practicing the piano like a boy possessed. Looking back, I can see that the moment I was introduced to those recordings changed the course of my life.

The second hobby was comedy. I'm not proud to report that I was one of the founders of the ‘Monty Python Appreciation Society’, which would meet on Wednesday lunchtimes in classrooms and chortle knowingly over the latest Python reruns on BBC2. I tried my hand at comedy myself while studying economics at Lancaster University, where I joined the Revue Group, which performed terrible, terrible student sketches in the campus theatre, giving a first taste of writing and performing. That experience hugely influenced my development as a comedian.

After graduating I worked in various art organisations pursuing a career in music administration, including the Edinburgh Festival, which is where I realised that there were people who could earn a living doing stand-up. Soon I started chancing my luck: unpaid five-minute spots in pubs led to 10 minutes, then 20 minutes and small sums of money started coming in. By 30 I had given up my last music job and devoted myself entirely to professional comedy. 

For the first few years of my comedy career I didn’t breathe a word about my music experience, but in 1996 I had to write a new solo programme for Edinburgh. The show, All Classical Music Explained led to a a BBC Radio series and television appearances. The following year, obviously filled with an ambition to lose even more money at the Festival, I took a group of eight musicians up to play alongside me, demonstrating some of the gags. This became the core of my ‘Orkestra’ which still exists and will be appearing with me at this year’s April Fool’s Day Comedy Gala on 1 April.

In 2001 I was invited for the first time to transpose all that into my first conducting engagement with a professional orchestra, the Tasmanian Symphony.  We successfully toured three cities down under and that was the start of my career as a grand maestro. Since I was now working with professionals, I had to go back into education to study conducting, firstly in London at institutions including the Royal Academy of Music, and subsequently at the Vienna Volksoper.

The biggest problem with this kind of thing is finding classical references that everyone gets. That doesn’t mean 'lowest common denominator' (this is classical music, after all), it means if you want to make all the audience laugh, you must start from a place everyone gets. I'm not interested in gags just for the musos, I’m interested in genuinely bringing laugh-out-loud comedy into the concert hall.

The other issue is overcoming preconceptions of what sort of experience a comic concert is going to be. There is really no-one else doing this kind of show with orchestras on a regular basis, so people struggle to find references. Most references involve names from over fifty years ago - such as Victor Borge and Gerard Hoffnung - which, unfortunately, bring to mind orchestras who are still deeply conservative.

This upcoming concert features my own Orkestra doing what I refer to as 'routines', but which the audience will experience as twenty-odd pieces of well-known music, each with some kind of comic conceit. Despite the wannabe Cortot and Furtwängler in me, I am still a stand-up comedian at heart, so I get a big kick out of hosting the show, introducing the guests and generally enjoying the company of the audience. The music is all in my arrangement and ranges from ‘translations’ of Rossini’s Largo al factotum to what Eine Kleine Nachtmusik would sound like if it had been written by ABBA. A big screen above the players aids and abets what is happening on the stage.  

As always, I am flattered that so many guests have agreed to take part. Over the years, I have worked with some of my heroes: Alfred Brendel, Marc-André Hamelin and Nicola Benedetti. This time, it will be Evelyn Glennie and Zeb Soanes, amongst others. This will actually be the second occasion I have worked with Dame Evelyn, the first being in 2009, when she performed a virtuoso marimba accompaniment to my Ride of the Valkyries played on massed Stylophones. It was something of a classic, if I say so myself.  Now I just have to master those Chopin Études and I can die happy.

Rainer Hersch's April Fool’s Day Gala will take place on 1 April at London's Cadogan Hall and will feature appearances from Evelyn Glennie, Zeb Soanes, Earl Okin, James Oldfield and The Rainer Hersch Orkestra. More information including tickets can be found here.​