Music / Elemental – Harmonic Curves. At the Wesley Music Centre, September 13. Reviewed by SARAH BYRNE

Elemental is the third in the 2026 season of harpist Alice Giles’ novel Sunday afternoon concert series.

This one gave the harp a bye, in fact, and instead features Giles’ partner and frequent collaborator pianist Arnan Wiesel and their daughter, the poet Moran Wiesel, for a program of “poems inspired by the elements: Ice, Water, Fire, Earth, Air, interspersed with thematically related musical works from the Baroque through to the 21st century.”

This took the form of thirteen new poems from Moran’s recently published collection, enspiralled – a soul’s breath, punctuated by ten pieces played by Arnan, carefully curated to complement them.

These pieces were remarkable both in how perfectly they suited and gave depth and context to each poem, and in the flair and expertise with which Wiesel pere delivered them.

It is clear from her biography as well as the content of the work that Moran Wiesel is a profoundly spiritual person. To take one line of that biography, “Moran is co-founder of Planet Song, an organisation which offers training, consultancy and creative activations in earth-spirit kin governance.”

Yet I struggled to engage with the texts as they likely deserve. The “sea-waves of fae-dragons” and the anthropomorphisation of trees are not concepts to which my lawyer’s heart can easily relate.

I found more to love in the music – a crashing, crunching performance of Messaien’s Ile de Feu 1 to evoke Pelehonuamea, goddess of the volcano; a glorious, thundering evocation of ‘a mountain took me today’ in Liszt’s Orage; the delightful Scherzo from Schubert’s Sonata in B flat major to create the river from “jostling hurtling bursting thunder free-fall”.

Scriabin’s ageless and lyrical Prelude Op 11 no 4 perfectly described “beneath Grandmother Arrayan Tree: underneath the hearth”, while Arvo Pärt’s For Alena was ideally suited to the Arctic mood of “instructions from the ice” and “shhh”.

This was certainly an interesting concert, and in some ways perhaps, a natural extension of the year’s first Harmonic Curves concert, Mystic.

I look forward to the next.

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