Queen’s Closet find musical threads in Baroque’s rich tapestry

Richard Betts

Music & features writer·New Zealand Listener·

29 Sep, 2026 05:02 PM3 mins to read

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Gordon Lehany (foreground) and Sharon Lehany (right) with other members of Wellington’s Queen’s Closet. Photo / Supplied

We tend to think of “Baroque music” as one stylistic blob: a bit of counterpoint here, some wildly ornamental stuff there and Bach’s yer uncle.

It’s really not like that. Why would it be? The period covers roughly 150 years: 1600-1750. If you leap forward the same time
span from, say, Beethoven’s last works, you’re knee deep in the Sex Pistols.

“You can tell people this stuff,” says music scholar Gordon Lehany, “but they quite rightly don’t want you to talk at them. If you can show them through the music, it’s much more effective.”

Wellington period orchestra The Queen’s Closet, where Lehany is artistic and musical director and his wife, Sharon, is manager, is showing people in an elegant and ingenious way by following a poem, Ludovico Ariosto’s early 16th-century epic Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando).

Baroque composers regularly used it as base material, and the Lehanys are cherry-picking bits from three operas linked by Ariosto’s work: La liberazione di Ruggiero, by Francesa Caccini, which premiered in 1625 and was the first opera written by a woman; Lully’s Roland, written for Louis XIV (1685), and Vivaldi’s Orlando Furioso, which is represented in two versions, from 1714 and 1727.

It’s a programme Queen’s Closet previously presented in 2023, but this time the group is adding light staging from Jacqueline Coats and related musical excerpts by Nicola Porpora, Luigi Rossi, Agostino Steffani and Handel. These are used as curtain and act music, which is how, Sharon Lehany says, opera would have been presented at the time.

The clever bit is that because Ariosto’s narrative provides the connective tissue, Queen’s Closet has stitched together a coherent story – despite the music spanning a century and composers from France, different parts of Italy and Germany (Handel was yet to settle in England when he composed Rinaldo).

Once they’d worked out the story arc, it was about finding the pieces that told the story, she says. “But when we’re populating a programme, there’s always a process of thinking, ‘What can we do that best showcases who we have and what we do?’ And listening through and going, ‘Oh, we’ve got to use that because it will really suit so-and-so.’”

Despite selecting music that suits particular people, there’s a reluctance at Queen’s Closet to spotlight individuals.

“It’s tempting to highlight singers,” Gordon Lehany says, “but with [our] singers and in the ensemble, everyone is a soloist. The production is intimate, and everyone, whatever part or instrument, is holding a line by themselves a lot of the time. It frees up [an ability to] ornament and make things their own, but it also means, unless you put everybody’s name on the poster, it’s sometimes better to not put anyone’s on.”

Queen’s Closet, Furioso, Hunter Lounge, Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, October 11, 2pm.

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