Human Planet

City dwellers, listen in. For an eye-opening taste of what life is like around the globe, just how different it can be, watch the BBC's stunning Human Planet series. Home can be many things – a boat in the Pacific, a dizzingly high treehouse, located in lands frozen by snow or dried out by sun. In this clip, one of the 'tree people' pops out for some honey. It's a bit more hair-raising than nipping to the corner shop…

Piano greats

Name your favourite pianist. Tough question, so I named five. They might change tomorrow, but hey, here are snippets of my current top keyboard wizards (in no particular order).

1. Martha Argerich


2. Alfred Brendel


3. Murray Perahia


4. Radu Lupu



5.Glenn Gould



Of course, the likes of Rachmaninov and Richter should be in this list, but there's something about having seen a pianist play live that, for me at least, makes them jump up the list over their long-gone counterparts. (Glenn Gould being the exception here.)

Daffodils

Daffodils are one of my favourite flowers. With their cheerful yellow, white and orange trumpets and stars, they herald the warmth of spring. I don't have any particular hankering to grow them, but, mooching around a fusty antique shop, I spotted a 50-year-old book all about how to cultivate daffodils. I wouldn't have bought it, except for the wonderful first sentence, and ensuing paragraph. Thanks MJ Jefferson-Brown.

To the paintings of Picasso, to orchids, and to daffodils no one can remain apathetic. The first, one may either like or dislike. With orchids one may perhaps feel like the atheist who went to the orchid show and came away convinced of the existence of the Devil. Like the spring they are part of, daffodils receive a universally warm welcome.

Views from the Square

There's a blonde woman with two golden retrievers. Harriet and Willow are their names. I know, because she shouts at them a lot. They, meanwhile, gamble around the grass, snuffling in people's barbecues, sniffing chocolate sauce and ice cream, playing, tugging, tumbling, rolling and cajoling until a lazy sunbather or amused student holds out a piece of charcoal encrusted sausage, which, more gratefully than any human recipient, Harriet, or is it Willow, gobbles up.

Glenn Gould and that Brahms Concerto…

It's not often that conductors feel it necessary to preface their performances with a disclaimer. But that's just what Leonard Bernstein did when conducting Brahms's First Piano Concerto in 1962, with the eccentric genius pianist Glenn Gould as soloist. Above is a taster of the slow, slow, slow tempos Gould chose. I've still got to hunt out a clip of a later section, which in Gould's hands seemed to turn from 19th-century turbulence turns into a 20th-century desolate wasteland.

In the meantime, here's that disclaimer:

Thought for the day

Le lecteur – je veux dire le vrai lecteur – est presque toujours un ami.
(The reader – I mean the real reader – is almost always a friend.)

Marcel Pagnol in La gloire de mon pere

Hungarians and Welsh

Even when you don't speak a language, it's often possible to pick up one or two words when abroad. At the very least, people often affect some sort of accent to indicate effort - who hasn't had a go at a mock Italian accent when ordering some 'bel-la pas-ta' or 'spa-ghet-ti bolo-gne-se'? Granted, tonal languages like Chinese and Japanese are going to prove more of a challenge, but in most European languages, being an English speaker means you should have at least a go at the basics of hallo-ing and goodbye-ing. Except there are a few languages that are guaranteed to flummox even the most dedicated of holiday linguists. Hungarian's one, but there's one even more close to home. Oh yes. Welsh.


Choice facts that I have learned: Welsh has two extra letters in the alphabet. But, sadly for all those Scrabble players, the high-scoring letters of j,k,q,v,x and z are taken out. Even more sadly, there are lots of double letters (which, 'Speak Welsh' helpfully advises are one single letter if you're doing a crossword. ch, dd, ff, ll, ng, ph, rh, th, Apparently it's a gendered language (masculine and feminine, which I hadn't known), and you pronounce everything that you see. Apart from when they're exceptions, which you just have to learn. But how on earth do you pronounce every letter in something as basic as 'I am' - 'Rydw i'?

But is it art? (2)

What would you say if your best friend spent 200,000 francs on a piece of art that looks, to you, like a blank white canvas? (No, he shouts, it's not white. It has pale diagonal stripes on it in pale grey. Besides, it's by a famous artist.) Playwright Yasmina Reza amusingly explores the dynamic of the three friends as they tussle over this expensive artwork. It's on now at the cosy Alma Tavern pub theatre (cosy in size, although the plastic seats are less deserving of this description).

Happy Birthday Alfred Brendel!

Well said

"I think great art has entirely progressive aspects within it, elements that are somehow outside the detail of the text or even the political opinions of the person who made it. Art itself, if it is really great, has a progressive aspect that is needed by a society, even if it seems absolutely useless in strictly practical terms. In a way art is a little like the dreams of a society. They seem to contribute little, but sleeping and dreaming are vitally important in that a human couldn't live without them, in the same way a society cannot live without art."

Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini in The Guardian

That was 2010...

As midnight starts chiming around the globe, here's a hastily flung together few lists dipping into the cultural life of 2010. They're highly subjective, not at all comprehensive and I may well scrub the lot tomorrow and start again. It's a mixture of new and old - what I've come across this year, rather than the best of what's new. It's a (blurred) snapshot rather than a scientific survey...

Top three books of 2010

- The Music Room by William Fiennes
- A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
- Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore
(Solar by Ian McEwan, too, if I'm stretching to four)

Top three films of 2010

- A Single Man
- Heartbreaker
- I Am Love

Top three concerts of 2010

- Valery Gergiev and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra in Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6
- Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri in Krakow
- Maria Joao-Pires's Chopin Nocturne Prom in the Royal Albert Hall

Top three CDs of 2010
- Schumann's Davidbundlertanze and Fantasy in C from Mitsuko Uchida
- Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony from the RLPO and Vasily Petrenko
- Mozart's Piano Concertos from Imogen Cooper and the Northern Sinfonia

A Simple Medium

Films, perhaps, show us who we want to be, and literature shows us who we actually are. Sitcoms, if they show us anything, show us people we might like to know.
Tom Bissell in The New Yorker, in his profile of sitcom writer Chuck Lorre