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.