`There's one side of me that hates opera," Derry-born composer Kevin O'Connell declares cheerfully. This is not the sort of confession you expect from someone who has written three of the wretched things: so explain, please, Mr O'Connell, what it is you hate about opera and why, in spite of that, you keep on writing them? "Well, it's basically because the commissions have come up. Opera Theatre Company set me off with a one-acter which I did with Gerard Stembridge called Sensational, and I've just conducted the Los Angeles premiere of my second opera, The Fireking. But far from being drawn to the form, like a lot of composers I'm drawn against it - the whole traditional set-up of it, you know? One set of philistines up on the stage singing for another set sitting in the stalls. That's basically how I grew up thinking about opera; and I suppose it was only when I started doing it that I thought `no, actually, this has possibilities' - and possibilities in a curious kind of way, for talking about contemporary things and getting it across to people. Which is what opera has always done; it's only in the past half-century or so that it has become ossified into a historical genre, like a kind of musical museum piece."

Even so, when Opera Theatre Company's artistic director James Conway phoned him up with an idea for a chamber piece based on three short stories by John McGahern, O'Connell - who happened to be reading Amongst Women at the time - had his doubts. "James suggested using the dialogue fairly straight, as it is in the stories, and I agreed. But McGahern's characters tend to talk - as we all do - in shorthand, and setting a prose libretto is much more difficult than setting one which scans and rhymes, for very obvious reasons. Poetry suggests musical shapes in a way that prose just doesn't. "So what I've tried to do in this piece is to provide a kind of musical underlay that will hold up the dialogue - structures that in themselves are fairly stringently shaped. You'll be aware of a lot of musical variations, strophic forms and so forth, which are intended to keep the dialogue afloat."

The three short stories in question are: My Love, My Umbrella; Sierra Leone; and Gold Watch, all of which deal with unhappy love affairs. In the director's programme notes, James Conway admits the decision to weave three stories together was a risky one. "Gold Watch is in a way the perfect story, and anything perfect begs to be left to be what it is. But there was something in the three which made another story, of choices in love, which I thought could be well told in music theatre." He adds that what he most admires in McGahern's fiction is its clarity, a quality which certainly strikes a chord with O'Connell. "I think that contemporary composers must try to achieve clarity in their work - it's almost a dirty word in a lot of contemporary music circles, but I think there's an absolute imperative there to make it as clear as possible to the audience what you're trying to do, present people with something which makes sense. I often feel, when I hear new music in performance, that if the piece had been worked on for another six months or a year then it might have come to something."

It's a problem he sees as part of the whole circular conundrum that surrounds contemporary music in general and opera, with its highly restricted repertoire of mainly 19th-century works, in particular. "The great 20th century masterpieces are not presented to the public very often, which means you get a kind of backlog - people are not trained into listening to this music. If Stravinsky and Schoenberg and the others were played more often, it would give a more immediate backdrop to what we're doing, because that's what we're writing against - as it is, contemporary composers are jumping into a vacuum."

This lack of familiarity ultimately poses a problem, as O'Connell sees it, not just for audiences and composers, but for music itself. "In an environment where audiences are not in a position to be overly critical of what they do, then composers are inclined to lower their standards - it's something that has always happened, but history has filtered out the bad music written in earlier centuries. I'm by no means suggesting that every new work that is performed should be a masterpiece, but there are basic criteria of technical competence and clarity of execution which should be adhered to. I teach composition here in Trinity College, and that's what I try my humble best to instruct my students. Make it clear."

While a student himself, Kevin O'Connell won the RTE Young Musician of the Future composer's prize; since then, he has written major works for the Ulster Orchestra and for soloists as diverse as Linda Hirst, Gerard McChrystal, Fionnuala Hunt and Raphael Wallfisch. His Cello Sonata (1993-95) was premiered by the latter on BBC Radio 3 this year and his String Trio (1986) is off to Hanoi shortly in the hands of the Offenburger String Trio. He is at present working on a BBC orchestral commission, his first orchestral piece in eight years, and enjoying it enormously. "It's great to stick your elbows out and remind yourself of the possibilities offered by a big orchestra," he says, with obvious pleasure. But do musicians ever come back to him and complain that they can't play something he has written? "Oh, yes, indeed - not that they literally can't play it, but they'll say things like `if we amend it slightly; if we just take out that one double stop, it'll lie nicely under the fingers, whereas if we leave in the double stop I'll crucify myself trying to play it'.

`That's how you learn instrumentation, really. My students and I endlessly study scores to see how composers get their effects - you can spend three or four hours looking at two bars of Mahler or Ravel, but finally the way you learn instrumentation is by working with good players and getting them to tell you the kind of practical detail that no orchestration book can ever go into."

Meanwhile, he awaits the Irish tour of My Love, My Umbrella with a keen interest. Commissioned by the Eastern Touring Agency with funds from the Arts Council of England and the Year of Opera and Music Theatre 1997, the piece has been touring in the UK since October 9th, and will receive its Irish premiere at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Dublin tomorrow night. "Watching it in rehearsal, I was struck by the darkness of the piece," O'Connell says. "The lovers just can't get it together at all. It's really a metaphor for the 1960s in Ireland, for the deep sense of frustration that people had, and the horizons of escape that they had.

"He reminds me of Philip Larkin in a way, John McGahern, with that rather grim but sometimes funny realism of his, that unblinking look at the way things are."

My Love, My Umbrella is at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin tomorrow and Saturday, the Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda on Tuesday, An Taibhdhearc, Galway on Friday, Town Hall Theatre, Kiltimagh on Sunday, Backstage Theatre, Longford on Tuesday, November 11th and the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast on Friday, November 14th as part of the Belfast Festival. Robert Dean conducts the OTC Ensemble with direction by Chrissie Poulter, design by Stephen McManus and costumes by Monica Ennis. The cast includes Niall Morris, Fiona McAndrew, Kate McCarney and Richard Jackson.