General Blog About Everything

Daniel Barenboim may resonate beyond the confines of the concert hall, Lang Lang may make more noise, but for sheer ubiquity, no musician can compare with the French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard: wherever you look, he’s there leading the charge with his trademark grin. He’s fronting the year-long Messiaen Festival in London, while leading a similar push in France, and he’s about to front the Aldeburgh Festival as artistic director. Last year, the 50-year-old devised and led a highly original concert series at New York’s Carnegie Hall, while doing a similar job in Vienna; meanwhile he was officiating as pianist-in-residence with the Berlin Philharmonic, and as artist-in-residence in Salzburg, Cleveland, and Lucerne, while at the same time holding professorships in Paris and Cologne. So who better to kick off both the 2008 London Proms?

Suntans are bad news, aren’t they? They’re technically unhealthy, make you
wrinkly and, on top of that, are morally dubious (now that, according to
Which?, eight year old kiddies are sneaking onto the electric beach in order
to look bronzed in the playground). Think of Nicole Kidman, Tilda Swinton,
dead-eyed Irish Jenny from The Apprentice…okay, maybe not her. Pale is
gorgeous. Tanning is for Posh Spice. Fine. Then, the unthinkable happens.
The sun comes out. In Britain! Before you can say malignant melanoma, we’re
up on the roof, in the park, grilling the gams, blithely taking our chances
with the UV rays whenever possible – as evidenced by the spiralling numbers
of skin cancers here.

This summer, millions of moviegoers will crowd into cinemas to see the latest
incarnation of The Incredible Hulk, starring Edward Norton. They have also
recently been introduced to the less familiar but equally action-packed Iron
Man, with Robert Downey Jr in the title role. Meanwhile, next year’s studio
slate includes spin-offs from X-Men and the Fantastic Four series, featuring
Wolverine and the Silver Surfer. Yet all of these heroes, whom most of us
now know as multimillion-dollar movie franchises, were once confined to the
mind of one man: Jack Kirby.

It’s 16 December 1922. Sergey Prokofiev receives a letter informing him that the trunk of precious papers and manuscripts he had packed up for safekeeping in the vaults of a publishing company upon his rushed departure from Russia in May 1918 has been lost. In it were the score of the Second Piano Concerto, a sheaf of childhood compositions, the notebook containing his diary between September 1916 and February 1917, photographs, letters to his father and records of his beloved chess tournaments. “But most of all I mourn the loss of the Diary,” writes the composer. “The loss of the Diary is a tragedy, as there was so much of interest in it: it was my last winter in Petrograd which saw the production of The Gambler and a general flowering of my talent.” He goes on to recall the professional tribulations, love affairs and squabbles contained in its pages, raging against the “scoundrels” who failed to ensure its safekeeping.