Our Sunday programme at Rippon Hall, Barroco, takes its name from the Portuguese word meaning an imperfect pearl — something naturally flawed, yet no less beautiful for it. This idea runs through the programme: that perfection isn't the goal in art or nature, but rather depth and human feeling. We’ve got a fantastic line up of festival artists joining us for these performances, including Baroque specialists James Bush (cello) and Erin Helyard (harpsichord).

The 2025 At the World’s Edge Festival begins in Wānaka in Rippon Hall, a striking setting for our first programme, Intimate Voices, which features three very different but deeply personal works for string quartet.

Laura Williamson, editor of 1964: mountain culture / aotearoa, asks if At the World’s Edge can get us all hooked on classical.

I’ve seen chamber music described as “a delicate, but intense, world in miniature.”

I like that, because it not only sums up what this niche of classical music is, but what makes good art. Good art takes big stuff and serves it up small. It packages emotion and history and ideas and gets straight to it with a word, a brushstroke, a note. It’s shorthand.