A decade under the stars

It’s wonderfully symbolic that my last concert of this decade will take place at the University of Cambridge and will be dedicated to stars. In an evening of piano and song music, Dr Sylvia Chan and I will be joined by none other than Oxford astrophysicist Dame Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell who will read selected poems about stars between the songs.

My love for astrophysics started back in 2010 when I was working on my Master’s concert project at the Royal Academy of Music. Through the music of Scriabin and Busoni, its narrative reflected the timeline of the physical transformation of matter, which in turn served as an allegory for the progression of human reason. The project ultimately led to my first album ‘Eta Carinae’.

As a postgraduate student, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967, which in physics is rightly considered as one of the most significant scientific achievements of the 20th century. The discovery was recognised by the award of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, but despite the fact that Bell was the first to observe the pulsars, she was controversially not amongst the recipients of the prize.

In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and donated the whole of the ￡2.3 million prize money to help female, minority, and refugee students seeking to become physics researchers.

Apart from being an extraordinary scientist and female champion, Jocelyn Bell Burnell is also an avid collector and commissioner of poems about Space. Her collection explores both the skies above and our own inner space, which – in Bell’s words - is ‘as hard to understand as outer space’.

Tickets and info: https://bit.ly/starsconcert

Date: Monday 16 December at 20:00

Place: Trinity College Chapel, University of Cambridge

Image credit: Portrait of Jocelyn Bell Burnell by Ben Hughes