Starmus bids goodbye to Tenerife today with a final day’s events in the Adan Martín auditorium in Santa Cruz. The hall is already filling for talks by Stephen Hawking and Alexei Leonov – the above picture has been released by the auditorium itself.
Last night the Magma Centre rocked at ear-splitting level to Rick Wakeman, joined on keyboards throughout the concert by his son Adam, current keyboard player for Ozzy Osbourne’s Black Sabbath. Rick explained that Adam had a break in his schedule and was delighted to join his father for the Starmus concert. Rick also said that he had been coming to Tenerife since 1985 but had never performed here before. That was well and truly set to rights last night, not least with the final piece of the set, Yes’ Starship Trooper.
As fantastic as many of the audience clearly found the concert, however, the universally acknowledged highlight was Brian May, who came on stage to give a guitar masterclass just over midway through the concert, switching to acoustic guitar for a rendition of Queen’s 39 – a piece written, he explained, from the perspective of a space traveller who returns, as Einstein forecast, in a short time to find that time has moved on much more on Earth. May also returned to the stage to play out the Starship Trooper finale. He might have been buzzing at how successful Starmus had been, but that will have been nothing to the buzz and memory that the audience will have had from hearing this music legend, and now Dr of astrophysics, perform.
Here are a couple of photos from last night … hasta la vista, one might say …