Critic Harriet Cunningham, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald about a performance by Charisma, Leichhardt Town Hall, Nov 28 2002: "Merry-Go-Round was commissioned by Ros Dunlop and Julia Ryder for cello, clarinet and CD-ROM. Its inspiration is photographer George Gittoes' collection of images from a recent trip to Afghanistan, including a series of poignant shots of kids playing on a crude wooden merry-go-round. The music is rich in tone colours and drones evoking the traditional music of Afghanistan. My one criticism here would be that the stunning images deserved more measured presentation. The impact of the multimedia ephemera in the two previous works was enhanced by slick digital magic, but the haunting music and images of Merry-Go-Round needed no such hi-tech packaging."

created after clarinettist Ros Dunlop and Martin Wesley-Smith toured East Timor in March and July 2002 presenting concerts of Welcome to the Hotel Turismo and X; premiered by Ms Dunlop in Manchester, January 2003, and subsequently in many other parts of England and Scotland

finished in September 2003 and subsequently performed by clarinettist Ros Dunlop and Martin Wesley-Smith in Darwin and then on a tour of the USA

Critic Harriet Cunningham, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald about a performance by Julia Ryder, Leichhardt Town Hall, Nov 28 2002: "Composer Martin Wesley-Smith has been a staunch supporter of the East Timor cause for many years, and this event was an ideal forum for three of his compositions, inspired by recent world events. Welcome to the Hotel Turismo tells of Dili's main hotel, where journalists, soldiers and homeless Timorese sheltered during the violence following the 1999 independence vote. Like all Wesley-Smith's works presented here, the acoustic part was accompanied by images and sounds on CD-ROM. In fact, cellist Julia Ryder's role felt almost redundant: she was literally upstaged by the screen, whose flickering montage of sound and sight bites made sense of a work which had, for me, seemed quite unsatisfying in David Pereira's 2001 performance, without visuals."

See X home page

Critic Harriet Cunningham, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald about a performance by Ros Dunlop, Leichhardt Town Hall, Nov 28 2002: "Generations of artists have struggled to find a language to give meaning to the senselessness of war. In X, a work for clarinet and CD-ROM dedicated to Xanana Gusmao, Wesley-Smith has taken up the challenge with every modern resource available to him, including extended techniques (brilliantly delivered by Ros Dunlop) and electronics. The result is genuinely confronting and moving: one cannot hope (or wish) to recreate the horror of East Timor in 1999, but this work is an important historical document. Perhaps not surprisingly, although the music is a fascinating patchwork of interwoven ideas, the most chilling moments are marked by silence."

East Timor web sites
ETRA

a version exists for
narrator & orchestra
(soon to be released on ABC Classics
by The Sydney Symphony Orchestra)