HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KRYSTIAN ZIMERMAN!

Krystian Zimerman notches up half a century today. When I was 14, I went with my parents to hear him play at the Royal Festival Hall. He was 23 and I'd never heard anything like it. There was a world in his piano that rolled together everything that was finest about art, poetry and pure, white-hot energy. He played the Brahms F minor Sonata Op.5, the Chopin First Ballade and the 'Funeral March' Sonata. Nothing was ever the same again. Ten years later, I had a job on a music magazine and I suddenly realised that all I needed to do was sell him to an editor, call up his manager and fix an interview, and then I could ask him all the questions I wanted to about what made that musicianship tick.

That was quite a while ago, but to this day, this man gives me faith in human nature, because he is as special a person as he is a pianist. The finest musicians play as they are; listening to the playing, you listen to them speak. You can hear their essence, distilled, in their music-making. Krystian is no exception. Few pianists have this degree of sensitivity, tenderness, intelligence and visionary wisdom, and few people.

Here's his page at Deutsche Grammophon: follow the link to the discography...

Happy birthday, Krystian! Have fun!

surfacing...

Good news before I get onto tonight's pseudoprofundities: the other day, I received a letter saying I've got a grant from the Authors' Foundation to help me write my next book! Would have opened champagne if I hadn't had food poisoning at the time.

Not sure whether that gliterati party really did try to murder a roomful of authors, agents and publishers with radioactive sushi the other day, but what's certain is that it's taken me the whole weekend to get back to normal and I missed a lunchtime recital by Philippe Graffin this morning in Norden Farm, Maidenhead, because I didn't feel up to driving the M4 - exceptionally annoying.

Anyway, tonight is the last night of Tom's tour, so I treated myself to one of several things I sometimes do when he's away. Pathetically innocent things, I hasten to add. Last time it was 'Titanic' and that wasn't long ago enough to do it again. So tonight I went for The Big Woody Allen Double Bill - 'Annie Hall' and 'Manhattan'. I saw them both for the first time more than 20 years ago, and goodness knows how many times in the intervening years, but still notice something new in them every time.

Glorious. Humour like that is the best kind: it shows up his serious points and makes them palatable. Who else could have dreamed up that scene with the skeleton, or the Planetarium, or the view of the bridge at dawn, in 'Manhattan'? Or the lobsters in 'Annie Hall'?

By the way, contrary to The Guardian and various other daft commentators, it IS possible and not yet illegal to do the following:

* Enjoy Woody Allen's films without condemning or condoning his action in marrying his ex-wife's adopted daughter;
* Enjoy Wagner without being a Nazi;
* Enjoy Chopin, Schumann and Liszt without being anti-Semitic;
* Enjoy Gershwin's 'Porgy and Bess' without believing that it's supposed to typify and therefore stigmatise or misrepresent the whole of African-American culture, or to be patronising thereto;
* Enjoy the soundtrack of 'Manhattan' - Gershwin again - without condemning it for not being an original soundtrack;
* Enjoy Korngold's serious music even though he wrote original soundtracks for Hollywood and dared to use tonality after 1930.

(This could go on forever, but The Guardian has recently had it in for Gershwin in a big way - see Gary Younge here and Joe Queenan here - and I think it's all gone a little too far. He's a great composer, already, so leave him alone, like it or lump it.)

This week's moral:

Beware of parties bearing sushi canapes.

Long live editors!

While Tom is away, I rent a lot of films on DVD. Yesterday I saw for the first time the 'director's cut' of one of my all-time favourites, Cinema Paradiso, and I was horribly shocked.

What???!?! During his return visit to Giancaldo, Salvatore not only finds that Elena is married to that really stupid kid from his class at school, but meets her again because he notices her daughter and follows her home. Then he has a steamy encounter with Elena in the car. And she won't go back to Rome with him, and the whole way they'd parted was a huge mistake though partly Alfredo's fault, because he'd decided that Salvatore had to become a great film director and if he and Elena stayed together, he wouldn't make any films. And her note to him is still pinned to the cinema wall with the invoices, although the cinema has only been shut for 6 years before the pending demolition, but they must nevertheless have last seen each other in the 1950s and the present day is 1980-something......I'm upset - by the implausibility, trivialisation, confusion and more. Whoever told the director that the film would be much stronger without this really, seriously, knew what he/she was doing.

Bravo for editors.

The Morricone score is still wonderful.

Hallelujah...

...I've just finished the first draft of my third novel. I thought I'd never get there. Crikey. 540 pages, 145,000 words of...oh dear... well, if I get rid of 25,000 words, ie the length of three and a half reasonable dissertations on Hungarian music, Gypsy fiddlers and why one really shouldn't fall in love with violinists, then maybe I'll have something decent to work with. It's been agony. But now is when the real slog begins.