MEDITATION ON DEATH

IAN Wilson, winner of the most recent competition for an organ concerto to be premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra, will hear the fruits of his labour at the National Concert Hall on Friday. And, as part of RTE's recamped Music Now series, there will be an all Wilson lunchtime programme of smaller scale pieces, played by Concorde in the John Field Room.

The inspiration for the half hour long, single movement concerto came from a cemetery at Caldragh on Boa Island in Co Fermanagh. "It's a really strange little place. It's by the lakeside, very overgrown, with a number of strange old statues. The ambience and atmosphere got me thinking. In essence, I decided that the piece would be a consideration or a meditation on death and what's beyond. This was, a few years ago, quite a big preoccupation for me, just one of those times when you go through a very morbid phase. Then, as a Christian, you have certain ideas about that, and I thought this was a chance to express them in something large scale."

His idea was to "explore everything I thought was encapsulated in the graveyard - hope and despair, the struggle of life, all those sorts of things". The finished piece, called Rich Harbour (the title comes from a painting by Paul Klee) is, he says, very much a concerto. Not a concerto of conflict in the mould of Brahms, but a concerto where "in essence, the organ is always generating the rest of the material, as well as its own. Everything is built around the organ line, apart from maybe a couple of orchestral interludes.

Given the starting point of the music, it is hardly surprising that among the three distinct characters he ascribes to the piece, one is of music which is "dark, chromatic, more moody than overtly despairing, but very dark (some of my best music in that area, to date)". There's also "aggressive, striving music", and, asserting itself as the piece progresses, music which is "more optimistic and overtly tonal, not particularly key based, but obviously diatonic".

A few years ago, Wilson would have felt a distinct aversion to the idea of writing "showy music". So, while he wanted the soloist's part to be "challenging and still not drag the music away from its central direction" he was "a little worried that it might be too easy". The soloist, Peter Sweeney, he says, has left him in no doubt that this was not the case.