London Day Two

Verdi's Requiem was a wonderfully moving experience. When we got tickets, the Barbican was nearly sold out, so we got two seats right up against the stage. We had a great view of the cellists and bassists, the conductor, and the tenor and baritone soloists, but couldn't see the bottom half of the huge chorus on risers behind the orchestra. The sound was glorious. The baritone, Robert Hayward, was especially good. The Guildhall School of Music and Drama supplied the symphony orchestra and chorus.
Sunday morning we walked through Hyde Park and onto Exhibition Road to the LDS Hyde Park congregation. It's a wonderfully cosmopolitan group. They receive so many visitors that they just have the visitors stand briefly en masse, rather than elicit individual introductions. They say it gets really crowded in the summer.
After church, we strolled to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Right on the ground floor is the scuplture exhibit. They have an "Age of Bronze" by Auguste Rodin, which we saw in the Philadelphia Rodin Museum earlier this month, and several Rodin pieces that were new to us.
My favorite piece in the museum was a life-size terracotta sculpture of a seated peasant woman in wooden shoes nursing a baby by Aime-Jules Dalau (1838-1902). I found a photo by searching the V & A museum sculpture collection for "Aime-Jules." Try it! http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/index.html
On our way back through Hyde Park we stopped at the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial fountain, which was full of children and adults wading. With a little (a lot?) of imagination, you can see it as a huge necklace made of moving water. It would be more effective as art without all the waders, but it's a pretty idea.
We also paid homage to the Peter Pan statue featured in one of my favorite movies, Hook, with Robin Williams as a grown-up, uptight Peter Pan and Dustin Hoffman as a marvelous James Hook. The statue is actually in the Kensington Gardens, next to the Serpentine. We thought of Lestrade dragging the Serpentine in Sherlock Holmes, but saw only small pleasure boats. And heard a lot of Spanish, presumably of the Continental variety.