A musical evening to bid a final farewell was captured in verse by poet and artist Frieda Hughes, remembering a dear friend.
Philharmonia for Sydney
Outside the doors smeared with the handprints of many thousands, the sun shone ordinarily, and in the sky, small clots of white exhaled and scudded by. But inside the organ-pipework walls, the first and second violins, violas, cellos, double basses, flutes, oboes and a single piccolo, clarinets, bassoons, contrabassoon, horns, trumpets, tuba, drums and harp, emptied themselves for Sir Sydney Lipworth.
If the memory of a man could ever wish for a soundtrack to the life he had lived, then this was surely it. The sound spiralled, tossed by the conductor and kept airborne by Nicola Benedetti, the grass-green of her dress gleaming, her hair pouring, her arms stripping her violin of every note from its polished throat. And we, the audience, stupefied by her impassioned violinist elbow as she breathed life back into Elgar as if he never left, and Sydney, and Rosa, and us.
