Season 2025
The Queen’s Closet’s Season 2025 again focused on development and community. We recognise the current challenges of being a performing artist, a performing arts organisation, or an active consumer of the arts. We designed our season to bring colourful, engaging and fun music of the 17th century to as many people as possible in an accessible way; to develop and look after our musicians, particularly those just emerging in the early music scene; and to partner with and support our sister arts organisations in Pōneke and beyond.
We know that, particularly in economic times like these, it can be difficult to prioritise buying concert tickets. So in 2025, we continued working with partners including the Wellington City Council to bring audiences performances with ‘name your price’ ticketing, encouraging audience-members to pay what they can afford.
Our main production of 2025 was Purcell’s Dioclesian in collaboration with the fabulous Tudor Consort. This was a semi-staged performance at The Hunter Lounge in Wellington’s Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington, with Jacqueline Coats as stage director.
Before that, we held an Easter performance of Renaissance music, Paschaltide, on Holy Saturday at St Peter’s on Willis, including music by the wonderful Ludwig Senfl and his teacher Heinrich Isaac. In what may be a first for Pōneke Wellington, audiences experienced all the colour of the era with period instruments of the Renaissance such as shawms, fully historic sackbut and slide trumpet.
Later in the year saw Wellington’s festival season in full swing, as we partnered with our friends at Black and Gold/Star Group to hold a French baroque-styled “Baroque Soirée” in the Public Trust Hall as a part of the Visa Wellington on a Plate festival, as well as our now-annual Gala Ball which saw audiences dancing to Baroque and Renaissance music. We also premiered a new composition by our own Luka Reardon, Bread and Circuses, in Classical on Cuba at the now sadly closed Fortune Favours brewery. Luka’s composition provided audience members with a fun and interactive way to explore the relationship between audience and performers.
Unfortunately we had to postpone our planned La Serenìsima performance of music from the Most Serene Republic of Venice, featuring music by Giovanni Gabrieli and his contemporaries on Renaissance instruments. This was intended to have taken place in November 2025, but instead we put on this performance in February of 2026.
We closed out Season 2025 with our first performance in Auckland, with a small Renaissance “Waits Band.” Our friends at Star Group hosted us at the excellent garden bar of the Sweat Shop Brew Kitchen, where we presented “Shawms against humanity,” a programme of engaging and danceable Renaissance music.
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With special thanks this season to:
