Martin Wesley-Smith
Martin Wesley-Smith wrote music audiences actually like: electronic pieces that stay human, choral parables that turn nursery rhymes into environmental inquests, and chamber scores laced with Lewis Carroll fantasy and hard political irony.
Two obsessions run through the work. Lewis Carroll yields Snark-Hunting, White Knight and Beaver, Alice in the Garden of Live Flowers and the music-box charm of pieces that hide menace under nursery tunes. East Timor and West Papua yield Quito, the radiophonic drama built around a young refugee’s own singing; Balibo for flute and tape; Welcome to the Hotel Turismo; Kolele Mai; Papua Merdeka; Morning Star Lament. Who Killed Cock Robin? remains the landmark choral work, sliding from parlour ballad and barbershop into pesticide dissonance that still makes crowds laugh and flinch. The electronic catalogue, from Vietnam Image to Wattamolla Red, proves tape and computer can sound warm, satirical and urgently humane. Chamber music for the Australia Ensemble, guitar quartets, harp septet and singing cellists keeps the same raised eyebrow: tuneful, metamorphic, never abstract for its own sake. Irony and slapstick sit beside real grief so that beauty and anger sharpen each other.
Artist's website: creative.gov.au
Martin Wesley-Smith is featured on the following titles
Blue Silence: Australian Music for Cello and Piano
This is the first disc of its kind released in Australia: an overview of important works for cello and piano spanning 108 years. The earliest is Grainger’s Scandinavian Suite, a tour de force that deserves a place in the concert hall.
Merry-Go-Round
Australia's foremost chamber group meets one of the country's most engaging composers. Martin Wesley-Smith draws on politics (East Timor, Afghanistan), Lewis Carroll, and personal tributes to Don Banks and Peter Platt.
Credit: Liner Notes [Annotations]
Quito
A powerful radiophonic music drama about Quito, a young East Timorese musician living in Darwin, whose schizophrenia and suicide become a lens on personal and political tragedy.
Radiophonic Adaptation
Wattamolla Red
By the mid-1990s Wesley-Smith had been composing electronic music for more than twenty-five years. The work stays accessible and human; anyone who thought electronics belonged only to specialists will find that view overturned here.
Composer
Recording Engineer: Recorded By
Credit: Liner Notes
Compositions by Martin Wesley-Smith also appear on
Six Fish
Guitar Trek began in 1987 and broke new ground for the guitar with a special “family” of instruments: standard guitars by Greg Smallman, treble guitars by Eugene Philp and Greg Smallman, and baritone and bass guitars by Graham Caldersmith.
Bolmimerie: SHE
SHE is the only harp septet in the world, and this is its first recording.
Electric Cello
David Pereira plays solo Australian cello works, each scored for cello with pre-recorded tape or delay. The Wesley-Smith and Ford pieces are world premiere recordings.
Mirrors of Fire
Every now and then a CD comes along that makes you glad to be alive: the music is so infectious and the performances brilliant. This is one such disc, featuring Timothy Kain, Australia’s virtuoso guitarist.
Lift Off: Australian Piano Music for Children
An engaging collection of piano music by Australian composers written to spark young imaginations. Elpis Liossatos, an Australian pianist then living in Greece, brings charm and enthusiasm to these performances.
An Australian Collection
Nineteen tracks drawn from the Tall Poppies catalogue, chosen to show the range and depth of Australian composition and performance across the label’s first decade.
Uluru: New Solo Cello Works for David Pereira
Twelve new Australian solo cello works written for David Pereira, celebrating the handing back of Uluru to its traditional Indigenous owners. Responses range from didgeridoo-like sonorities in Hopkins to the modernism of Dean.
A Day in the Life of a Clarinet
Peter Jenkin presents the clarinet in its many modern guises, equally at home with Alban Berg, multi-tracked Bach, klezmer, tango, jazz and electronics.
Mere Bagatelles
As an overview of Australian composition in the 90s, this CD could not be bettered: a musicianly survey of short piano works, with performances of real authority.
Watt Ever
Electronic music drawn from twenty years of WATT concert presentations. Australia’s only organisation regularly staging audio-visual and electronic works, WATT gathers tape, computer and live-electronic pieces spanning that period, bringing several composers to CD for the first time.
Spinning: New Australian Flute Music
Geoffrey Collins has single-handedly shaped the Australian flute repertoire, and this is his third solo recording. Five of these works were written for him, and they show how freely composers respond to his playing.
The Green CD
In a climate of rising concern for the planet, this programme of Australian choral works turns on nature and protest. Wesley-Smith's Who Killed Cock Robin? stands as a landmark of Australian choral writing, and one of its most popular.
Stroke
A striking programme of contemporary Australian piano music, superbly played by New York–based Australian pianist Lisa Moore. Smetanin's formidable title work, among the most demanding in the repertoire, was captured here in a single take.
Café Concertino
The Australia Ensemble, Australia's foremost chamber group and in residence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, presents commissioned and core Australian chamber works.
Other credits
Cello Rhapsody
Pereira's main strength is his passion, heard here in repertoire that ranges from the simplicity of songs to the dramatic nuance of the Hispanic rhapsodies.
