‘Why are there so many… Songs about rainbows?’ Hans Liberg, the Dutch musician and self-professed ‘sit-down’ comedian, chirrups down the phone from Holland. It’s not intended as an impromptu serenade, although the rendition of Kermit the Frog’s famous banjo solo, I have to admit, is endearing. In fact, Liberg is demonstrating one of the moments in his life, when he discovered he was actually kinda funny, as well as a gifted musician.
‘It was during a children’s musical, and all these things went wrong!’ Liberg recalls. According to his wife and friends, the musician’s reactions to on-stage mishaps had audiences in stitches. In his mid-twenties at the time, Liberg decided he could use this subconscious knack of turning musical mistakes into improvised humour as the basis for a one-man comedy show.
Now, he’s been sending up everyone from classical composers to modern pop icons for the past 20 years. His efforts even won him an Emmy in 1997, and on top of that, he was invited back the following year to host the prestigious ceremony.
The comic’s Victor Borg-style show also went down a treat at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival several years ago. The show sold out largely through word-of-mouth, but the delight was not just on the audiences’ behalf – Liberg had never played to such an enthusiastic crowd before.
He’s had considerable success in his native Holland, too, as well as Germany, Austria, Belgium and France. Liberg is also the recipient of this year’s German Music Prize for Entertainment, which will be awarded to the performer on German television in June.
It’s all came as a bit of a surprise to the man himself, who admits music was the first language he knew. He was just two years old when his fingers touched the keys of a piano in the family home. Soon afterwards he was picking up the drums and guitar, the latter of which, he concedes, he taught himself to tune by listening to the Bee Gees’ Spicks and Specks. ‘I had the tuning wrong, but it sounded OK,’ he quips. ‘When you first start playing music, it’s very intuitive. You don’t know the rules or how you are “supposed” to do it. You do it in your own way when you have a musical talent.’
The main influence on Liberg’s blend of music and comedy is Victor Borg, but while Borg focused on classical music, Liberg’s repertoire extends to pop, which he integrates seamlessly with classical concertos and symphonies.
‘I always combine classical and pop music because I think classical music was originally a kind of pop music,’ Liberg notes, alluding to the ‘superstar’ status of composers such as Mozart, Schumman, Beethoven and Bach in their own day. In previous shows, Liberg has dusted during Liszt’s long pauses, slipped from Mozart’s Queen of Night aria into Stayin’ Alive and combined the German national anthem (by Haydn) with Beatles’ hits Let it Be and Hey Jude!
Although audiences would need to have some knowledge of classical music to understand the jokes, Liberg says his performances have a more universal appeal, through the references to pop. But is he inspired by the eccentricity of the great composers?
‘It’s not the composers, it’s more like the music tells the story,’ he replies, taking as an example the unification of Europe. He used Beethoven to comment on the issue, for instance, because of the composer’s links with Napoleon. In a moment of seriousness, Liberg adds that while everyone was talking about unification ten years ago, he believed ‘it’s more interesting to look for diversity’ than unity. There’s method in this performer’s madness – Liberg’s shows often have a socially aware undercurrent.
He admits that Mozart works well because ‘he was a very funny man’, but on the other hand, Mozart was also a trend in society at the time. ‘My jokes are more about the trend than with the composer,’ Liberg explains. Schubert, however, was more romantic and tragic. ‘There’s nothing funny about him,’ Liberg adds, so he pulls in examples of pop for the comic effect.
In his new show, which he brings to London’s Purcell Room next month, Liberg has taken the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for the phonetic title of the performance, Tatatata (insert ‘ta-ta-ta-taaaaaa’). The symphony’s use as a victory song in wartime also has relevance to the current political situation, he notes. Meanwhile, two musicians appearing onstage dressed as bodyguards refer to the fact politicians in Holland are now assigned minders, following the first murder of a Dutch politician (Pim Fortuyn) last May.
‘They look like “Men in Black” and they play Schumann piano concertos,’ he jokes.
Hans Liberg performs ‘Tatatata’ at the Purcell Room, South Bank Centre, London April 19 and 20. Tickets £14/£10, 020 7960 4242.
