Sixteen members of Pegasus, directed by associate musical director Jessica Norton, performed on July 22 at Goddards, a house designed by Edwin Lutyens in 1900 and now owned by the Lutyens Trust and leased to the Landmark Trust. The Landmark Trust’s Open Day saw several hundred visitors wander round the large house and its exquisite garden in the village of Abinger Common in Surrey.
We performed four fifteen-minute sets of music for the visitors, including folksong arrangements by Vaughan Williams (who lived nearby), Robert Pearsall’s “Lay a Garland”, which drew appreciative comments from the audience, and, on the lighter side, Cole Porter’s “Let’s Fall in Love” and Gershwin’s “Summertime”. The last piece was on the programme in spite of – rather than because of – the weather, since it rained steadily all afternoon and we only manged to sing part of one set out of doors between showers, retreating to the library and common room for the rest of our performances.
When not singing, we made ourselves at home, sampling books from the library, playing skittles in the skittle alley (they knew how to design houses back in the day), and feasting on a picnic – albeit an indoor one. The Abinger Hatch pub made an excellent retreat to quench our thirst at the end of the afternoon.
