Singing to friends

This morning, accompanied by Melita, I had the chance to sing another solo to our German speaking group in the German Ambassador's reception room which has super acoustics. Nineteen people were there. I sang Franz Schubert's An die Musik, a setting of words by another Franz, his aristocratic friend Franz von Schober, amateur poet, lithograph and actor, who was only a year younger than the composer but who lived more than half a century longer than he. It's touching to think that nearly two hundred years ago in Vienna those two young men shared the same music with their own friends. We tried it a second time in a lower key, encouraging the others to join in; it works quite well as a unison piece and I think everyone appreciated the words:

Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden,
Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt,
Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb entzunden,
Hast mich in eine beßre Welt entrückt!
Oft hat ein Seufzer, deiner Harf' entflossen,
Ein süßer, heiliger Akkord von dir,
Den Himmel beßrer Zeiten mir erschlossen,
Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir dafür!

Then I taught them this round in three parts ("Heaven and earth must pass away; music remains."):

We sang Die Loreley as well (not the same calibre of music as the Schubert but maybe easier to learn) and stayed for a scrumptious lunch outside on the patio, after which I cycled home through Rockcliffe, mostly freewheeling, a lovely downhill ride.

Wedding on the grass

Andrew, the son of our friends Carol and Don, got married to Lillian yesterday, and Chris and I, with our friends Elva, Laurie, Francine and Roger, were among the guests at this lovely wedding which took place under maple trees in the open air, at Temple's sugar bush in Lanark County.

One of the young men from Lillian's family played Don's electronic piano as we arrived to take our seats on the lawn between the trees. Andrew, looking appropriately handsome, with James, his best man, stood in front of us waiting for the bridal party to arrive. How similar weddings all are; people love traditions. However, Chris and I hadn't come across the ceremony where the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom (Anita and Carol) carry lit candles to the front table, where a central, taller candle stands waiting to be ignited by the young couple from these two family flames. Another nice touch was the procession of little children, the "flower girl"and the "ring bearers", before the bride arrived.

Lillian walked down the steps, across the wooden bridge and across the grass on her father's arm. The ceremony was a religious one, incorporating an "Invocation" and an "Exhortation" from Rev. Russell and a Bible reading. The exchange of Marriage Vows and Ring Ceremony, based on the Solemnization of Matrimony in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, was approximately as remembered by Chris and me, but the four hundred year old phrases—"With this Ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship..."—have been down-graded these days to something less than the original poetry and because they have lost that old resonance I'm afraid they're therefore less memorable. Why was it thought necessary to alter "...till death us do part"? wondered Chris, as he drove me home at midnight. Oh well, at least the word committees have thought fit to keep the phrase "foresaking all others"; that's something.

A grey cloud blew over but no rain fell to blot the Registry during the solemn signing and witnessing of signatures (click on my photos to enlarge them). Lillian and Andrew were triumphantly man and wife and could go indoors to celebrate.

After the solemnities and the photo shoot, Lillian's little nephews stopped behaving like miniature adults and started to let off steam. Later, while the grown-ups were making speeches or sitting round tables to eat salads downstairs in the timbered reception room, the children, dressed in aprons with their names on, were upstairs, busy decorating cupcakes. What a great idea.

On Canada Day

People, clouds!

George gone

It strikes me that we got through a phenomenal amount of music making during the two-and-a-bit days when George was with us.

To his accompaniment, we sang Schubert's Lied eines Schiffers an die Dioskuren as well as his Shepherd on the Rock (plus clarinet, of course), Beethoven's In questa tomba oscura (bass), half a dozen assorted Dichterliebe songs (for baritone or mezzo soprano, depending which of us was available), three arias in Italian (soprano) from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, a song composed by George's great uncle Frank Bishop, a song by his grandfather Robert Tullett, Hugo Wolf's Im Frühling (soprano), the Pamina-Papageno duet from Mozart's Zauberflöte, Vaughan Williams' duet that's a setting of Shakespeare's Fear no more the heat o' the sun, an earlier than the usual setting by Schubert of Goethe's Lied der Mignon: Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, which George in fact taught me (his friend Anna knows it and we "Skyped her" in Chile to discover its D-number before trying it out). Then this morning just before the taxi arrived to take us to the airport, he and I gave a spirited rendering of Purcell's I attempt from love's sickness to fly.

Non vocal music was the Nils Gade Fantasistykker for piano og Klarinet eller Violin (that language is Danish!) which we tried both on the violin (forgetting to close the patio door so that today my neighbour mentioned hearing it)—the first two movements—and on the clarinet—all four! Chris and George also played the arrangement for piano and clarinet of the famous slow movement for the Borodin 2nd Quartet. When neither Chris nor I was available to sing or play with him, George also played us piano solos: a Bach prelude and some Chopin mazurkas.

Another juxtaposition worth noting was that while George was sending instant wireless messages to a girl in Beijing he was simultaneously speaking over the phone to his grandmother in Wales. We also had his sister and family on line so that our grandson in London could see how the chipmunk in our garden in Ottawa climbed onto George's knee and found its peanut. "He is stuffing it in his mouth!" said Alexander.

George here

He sets off again tomorrow, more's the pity, but I think we can call his short stay with us Quality Time. George has published his own blog post about the visit, so I'll just add a few details he didn't mention: the walk we did with Elva, Laurie and Carol was the Sugar Bush trail near the Gatineau Park visitors' centre at Chelsea and after that we lunched out of doors in the beautifully relandscaped garden, complete with "waterfall" and outdoor bar, that's part of Chelsea's Pub. At home we made music, almost as in the old days, although Emma was missing to make up the quartet, singing and playing the clarinet and violin to George's accompaniment on the piano—duets and trios, including Schubert's Hirt auf dem Felsen, this evening. The kittens were the ones I've mentioned before, the Flying Club's latest mascots.

Montreal

No, that is not a picture of Montreal, but a shocking picture of Hongsibao, China. The photographer, Benoit Aquin, won an award presented by Kofi Anan for his depiction of the dust bowl of China. We saw it in Montreal as part of an astonishing photography exhibition at the Galérie Pangée on the rue St Paul near the Vieux Port. Other places we walked past were the McGill University campus, Square Victoria, the Science Centre on the river bank where they show IMAX films and advertise "Science for Kids"—oh, that does annoy me. Why say that, as though science were for kids only?—and the archeology museum at Pointe à Callière where people were queuing up to get in, as they were outside the Cirque du Soleil tents. Chris and I carried on as far as the Clock Tower on the eponymous Quai de l'Horloge where we climbed the 192 steps to see the view from the top of the tower, above the clock faces.

We had driven to Montreal to meet our son George whose conference in New York finished on Friday. He took the Amtrak train, the ADIRONDACK, that left Penn Station, NY, at 8:30 and was supposed to pull into Montreal's Gare Centrale at 19:10, except that it was an hour and a half late due to problems with three of the passengers (not George and the Danish girls with whom he was sharing window seats) at the Canadian border. Therefore before driving back to Ottawa with George Chris and I had a long wait for him on the station concourse ... There could be worse places to wait; it is quite comfortable there.

In any case seeing George again was absolutely worth the wait!

Instant friends

One of my friends, new to Facebook, has just sent a message to another of my recent Facebook friends extolling the delights of this toy by telling her:

Dieses Facebook hat es in sich, ich bin auch neu. ... In Windeseile bist du Freund mit dem Rest der Welt!

Fast as the wind blows, you're friends with the rest of the world. I like that.