A couple of photos taken by Wendy in the rehearsal. The first of the composer of The Armed Man, Karl Jenkins, who is conducting the performance tomorrow and the second, in black and white, of the choir listening to Jonathan Griffith, the rehearsal conductor.
I left Wendy and took a stroll down 7th Avenue to visit Times Square again. It was much less busy than the day before and I was able to walk up to the top of the stand they have erected to enable visitors to sit and have a great view of the Square. It gave me an opportunity to take more photos from a perfect vantage spot.
I walked back to the hotel, met up with Edward and Kate and waited for Wendy to come back after her rehearsal. As soon as Wendy returned, we had lunch at a local deli and afterwards, while Wendy went to her afternoon rehearsal, we decided to walk up 7th Avenue to Central Park and then make our way to the Guggenheim Museum of Contemporary Art.
The weather was lovely and the walk through the park was great fun. We walked to the central lake with its giant fountain.
The obelisk, which apparently is from 1450BC. I need to Google it to find out more about its history.
Close to the pond where model boats were being sailed, we were approached by a group of young men in swimming trunks asking us to make a contribution to help them with their Olympic training costs!
By the pond was this rather interesting bronze statue of Alice in Wonderland. It was a perfect place for children to play.
We exited the park to visit the Guggenheim Museum. The architect was Frank Lloyd Wright and I wonder if Sir Norman Foster got the idea from the interior stairway for the internal spiral staircase that winds round the dome of the Reichstag in Berlin.
From there we walked down Madison Avenue. When we were near St. Patrick's Cathedral, the roads were closed off as there was a service being held there for the 343 firemen from the New York Fire Department who died in the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. There were firemen from all over the USA, as well as from around the world. They stood in massed ranks on the steps of the cathedral.
Across Madison Avenue, as we walked into the Rockefeller Centre, there were dozens of Stars and Stripes hung from flagpoles surrounding the famous Plaza.
I then spent a lazy couple of hours not doing very much before we met up again with Wendy and headed downtown to visit the High Line Gardens. I had read about these in one of the Sunday Telegraph travel sections. We took the subway from 52nd Street to 23rd Street and then walked a couple of blocks to the High Line Park.
Our first view of the High Line running across one of the Lower Manhattan Streets.
It is the most amazing regeneration project imaginable. A couple of miles of the old elevated railway that was used to move the meat to and from the meatpacking warehouses have been totally transformed. The railway track was threatened with demolition and, following a campaign to save it, New York now has a truly unique leisure park. The High Line was opened in 2009. It is a wonderful park through which you can stroll looking across Manhattan to the east, and across The Hudson River to the west.
With the sun setting and a beautiful sky, it was a perfect way to spend a couple of hours.
As it became dark, we saw the amazing twin lights that shine upwards from the site of the World Trade Centre. The beams appeared to meet at a single point reflecting on the clouds and looked like a giant star. It was a very poignant reminder of what happened ten years ago tomorrow. Sadly the photos we attempted to take did not come out well enough to post to the blog.
We ended the day by having a very good meal at a restaurant close to the southern end of the High Line.
Tomorrow Wendy has her final rehearsal in the morning in the Avery Fisher Hall at the Lincoln Centre and then the concert takes place at 2pm.
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