New Georgian Opera at Gunton Park

Midsummer's Eve

Saturday 21st June 2014

In aid of The Gunton Park Sawmill and The Churches Conservation Trust

                           Gunton Park at 9.30 pm - Midsummer's Eve 2014

Gunton Park is an enchanted world at any time, but even more so on the Solstice. Kit Martin, Ivor Braka and those others lucky enough to live at Gunton have created an earthly paradise in the heart of Norfolk. The house, until 1980 a scorched shell, is now a beloved home, and the park, Gunton's treasure, is verdant and serene - one can hardly imagine now the state it was in before Kit Martin took it on. 

By the 1970's the great park was a sequence of ploughed-up arable fields, the stately trees were neglected and many lost and the whole had lost its sense of homogeny completely. Thirty years on we are seeing the park as the Georgians would have loved to have seen it, albeit with the crucial elbow from Kit in the nick of time! 

                                     Gunton Park Sawmill

Sheltered by the side of the lake is Gunton's water powered sawmill, which was built in 1824. This is the oldest surviving mill of its type in the country and is, I can report, running more smoothly than ever one hundred and ninety years on! Russell Yeoman and David Doak very kindly showed us around the amazing building, with its picturesque thatched roof that gives no clue to the complicated and massive machinery inside. These great English estates were worlds of their own, so why not have a sawmill disguised as a hermit's cottage!?

…inside the Sawmill

NGO's brilliant secretary, Zuleika Parkin, proposed the idea of a concert here at her home. Thus New Georgian Opera, with enormous help from Diana Parkin and other great Gunton-ites (including Wendy Yeoman, Brian and Elma Thaxton, Linda Hartley, Liz James and Nell Stamp), staged a concert in aid of the sawmill and the Churches Conservation Trust on Saturday evening to a full and supportive audience.

                          Gunton Church

Gunton has a lot of rather extraordinary and beautiful treasures, one of which is the church. Gunton Church was opened in 1769 and is Robert Adam's only complete church in the Country. Disguised as a Classical temple it has the acoustic and atmosphere of the perfect music room in an Italian palazzo. We started the programme with Purcell, with his birthday ode to Queen Anne, 'Sound the Trumpet'…this ought to have been called 'Sound the Chihuahua' on this particular evening as Meeta's 'Diva Dog', She-Ra, was in full voice from the pew beside us. We ended the programme with 'Pur ti miro' from Monteverdi's 'L'incoranazione di Poppea'. 

Diva Dog

                      Off to the Sawmill on a 1910 steam powered Stanley Motor

OCBG in the Sawmill

After the concert we had dinner overlooking the magnificent park with our kind hosts, Helen and Colin David, Diana Parkin and also Kit and Ivor, two people who really have, along with those who believed in their vision, saved this extraordinarily precious stretch of England.

                           Oliver Gerrish, Kit Martin and Ivor Braka

                 ET IN ARCADIA EGO

For information on Gunton Park Sawmill please go to:-
http://www.guntonparksawmill.co.uk

The Churches Conservation Trust:-
http://www.visitchurches.org.uk

and New Georgian Opera:-
www.newgeorgianopera.co.uk