French electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre will team up with Queen guitarist Brian May for an exceptional one-off live concert event to open this year's Starmus Festival in Slovakia on May 12.
With a theme this year of ‘Starmus Earth: the future of our home planet’, the five-day event, which runs from May 13-17 is a gathering that convenes Nobel laureates, scientists and researchers, astronauts, intellectuals and artists for lectures and discussions on topics including environment, AI and cybersecurity, and space, as well as featuring the annual presentation of the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, for which Jean-Michel Jarre was a recipient in 2017.
"As we continue to learn from the past, we should today listen to the future, being receptive and attentive to the incoming signals," says Jarre. "Breakthroughs, discoveries, and solutions, in all fields exist already there ahead, in the future, waiting for us to find them. It is our vocation as artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and citizens, to engage and activate progress, in creating a bridge from the future: this is the spirit of Starmus."
Jarre's concert kicks off the event and takes place in cooperation with the City of Bratislava, is free to attend and will be televised on Slovakian National RTVS as well as globally via the EBU network and live-streamed on Jean-Michel Jarre’s YouTube channel.
Starmus was founded by astrophysicist Garik Israelian, PhD, and Queen guitarist and PhD in astrophysics Sir Brian May, under the auspices of the late Stephen Hawking.
This is not the first time that prog musicians have been involved with the event. Rick Wakeman has performed at Starmus in the past, while in 2020 Anathema memorably performed Pink Floyd's Keep Talking with the late Stephen Hawking, which you can watch below.
