Music / Penta Harp Ensemble. At Wesley Music Centre, March 16. Reviewed by LEN POWER

With five harps onstage, Penta Harp Ensemble, in its debut concert, certainly made a big impression.

Penta Harp Ensemble is a new Australian harp quintet formed to showcase the full range of sound that the modern concert harp has to offer.

Led by Alice Giles, the ensemble includes Rowan Phemister, William Nichols, Kate Moloney and Melina van Leeuwen. Giles announced, proudly, that the four harpists sharing the stage with her had formerly been her students. Each of the ensemble now performs nationally with Australia’s foremost orchestras and chamber ensembles.

The program featured works by Australian composers Mary Doumany, Elena Kats-Chernin and Ross Edwards as well as works by Debussy, Ravel, Richter, Lecuona and Salzedo. The concert also included a premiere of a new work by emerging composer Katia Mestrovic.

The concert began with three works by Claude Debussy, Pour invoquer Pan, dieu du vent d’été (To invoke Pan, god of the summer wind), The Drowned Cathedral and Clair de Lune. These three very different works showed the versatility of the harp to create atmosphere. The deep resonance in the harp playing of The Drowned Cathedral could be physically felt as well as heard.

The second work presented was the premiere of Elektra by Katia Mestrovic. Inspired by the 1962 film, Electra was originally a Greek Tragedy by Euripides. In the first of four sections, the performers sang Ancient Greek text as they played, creating an tense atmosphere to reflect Electra’s suffering and anger.

The following sections took us musically deeper into the emotional turmoil of this dark tragedy. It was a fascinating and very effective work and the strong applause from the audience was well-deserved. Mestrovic was in the audience and looked delighted as she took a bow.

The other works clearly showed how versatile the harp can be. There was Kats-Chernin’s visually sparkling Dance of the Paper Umbrellas, Mary Doumani’s unexpectedly jazzy Kali, the fiery Alborado del Gracioso by Ravel and the wonderfully calming Mercy by Max Richter. Carlos Salzedo’s Rumba and Ernesto Lecuona’s Malaguena, both well-known melodic works, brought this thrilling and inspiring concert to a close.