Belgrade seemed simply like a cheap place to live - until the bombs starteddropping. So composer Ian Wilson found a new home, up a boithrín in Leitrim, where Michael Dervan found him exploring a new sense of darkness in his music.
When Belfast composer Ian Wilson made the decision to settle in Belgrade with his Serbian partner, musicologist Danijela Kulezic, the last thing he probably expected was to end up in Leitrim instead. At home in Northern Ireland, he'd been earning a living from teaching as well as composition. The move would free him from the double workload, as the fees from Western commissions would go much further in the Serbian capital.
He relocated in May 1998, but quickly found himself living in a city faced with the prospect of bombing raids. I remember phoning him in Belgrade, early in 1999, to talk about a new work, Limena, that was due to be premièred by the Irish Chamber Orchestra. It seemed an extraordinary thing to be able to do, to speak freely with someone in a country about to experience the full rigours of a military attack from the world's mightiest international alliance. We were both aware of the resonances of what we were talking about - the work we were discussing had its own course and content changed by the fact that the Omagh bombing took place while he was working on it.
Leitrim, you might think, was an escape into remoteness, an Irish backwater carefully chosen to follow the abortive attempt to settle in one of the most troubled of European capitals. The reality was rather more mundane. The attractive possibility of a composer-in- residence post with Leitrim County Council tilted the balance and he's now settled near Dromahair, in a landscape that's at least moderately forbidding on a dark and rainy wintery day.
Darkness is something which has established a new presence in Wilson's output in recent years. He was working on three major commissions when he lived in Belgrade: Limena, a piano concerto, which Hugh Tinney premiered with the ICO; a saxophone concerto for the BBC, and a song cycle for the London Mozart Players. These were pieces, he says, which "were all bound up with themselves". Being in the Balkans did have an influence. "That whole thing about moving to Belgrade, partly because of the circumstances of being there, and what happened when I was there, I think it made me much more willing to write about personal reactions and experiences and emotional states rather than maybe more abstract, geographical ones."
The change, however, was effected by other, more directly musical, causes too. He encountered the music of the German composer, Peter Ruzicka. "I was getting a bit frustrated with the way I was working with material.
"Writing my fourth quartet, I felt that it wasn't exciting . . . That wasn't the way things should be . . . That Ruzicka piece [the third quartet] seemed to unlock something within me - the notion that there's a much broader palette of sound and technique that could be used compositionally without sacrificing musicality. There's nothing I'm writing that nobody else has written. It's not the idea of pioneering experimentation or anything like that. What I'm trying to do is have a more expansive sound palette."
To the listener familiar with Wilson's work, there's a feeling that the composer has identified new territory to be conquered. "I would say that since about this time two years ago, I feel I've been in a period of experimentation, and much more willing to push boundaries when I get the opportunity, which isn't every time."
The three pieces he was working on in Belgrade involve soloists, as do the two works featured in tonight's 'Horizons' concert, with the National Symphony Orchestra under André de Ridder: An Angel Serves a Small Breakfast, his second violin concerto, with Rebecca Hirsch as soloist, and Shining Forth, a cello concerto played by Robin Thompson-Clarke.
"The whole concerto thing seems to be a very suitable way for me to work - the focus on one line and trying to have that line find its resonance within the orchestra. Maybe this is not the case so much with Messenger [his first violin concerto], but certainly with the second concerto. It's some sort of large-scale unity I'm trying to achieve in those pieces, where everything that goes in the orchestra is directly relatable to what goes in the solo part. That Brahmsian notion of conflict between soloist and orchestra is just not appealing to me. I'd rather that everybody was unified in the desire to go toward the common goal."
There have been other, behind-the-scenes, changes, too. "It was in the fifth quartet and Abyssal [premièred by the Crash Ensemble in 2000] that for the first time I actually started writing without any clear, pre-compositional structure in mind." This is a process he's extremely wary about. "I know some people start off like that. But I feel there's a terrible temptation to get all kind of loose. With these pieces I was hoping that some inherent sense of balance and structure would find itself organically."
WILSON'S current preoccupation is an opera, to be premièred next year in the north German city of Flensburg. It's a version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, to a libretto by Lavinia Greenlaw, focusing on a crippled child - a young woman in the opera - who hasn't been able to keep up with others she's been told are headed up the mountainside.
"This is the final work of my research fellowship - the AHRB research fellow at the University of Ulster. Everything has been leading up to this, really. It's maybe crystallising some things -line, again, the vocal lines become central to everything. I'm trying to create an environment which is very intimate, musically, so that the singers can sing mezzo piano for most of it, and have this conversational, intimate quality to it. Which also means that the lines become much clearer, in my theory, and that the words become more audible."
During our conversation, Wilson seems shy of mentioning the names of any other composers, apart from Ruzicka. When prompted, however, he relents. He's been listening with pleasure to Helmut Lachenmann's Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied - "a complete riot", he says.
He also enthuses about György Kurtág, whose Grabstein für Stephan "is one of the best pieces of the last 10 or 15 years". Another name that comes up is Morton Feldman, whose slow, quiet music, he says, has influenced his thinking about the opera. "I adore his music, but my sensibilities lie too far away from his . . . I think it's to do with his being satisfied with just the material . . . I want the material to take on some meaning beyond itself. Which is why I'm always very interested in the aspiration to convey emotional states. Maybe this puts me squarely in the 19th century. But music to me is an emotional language. It functions for me on that level and therefore I try and make it work for me on that level when I'm writing. So, while I love Feldman's music, it touches me in a different way than Shostakovich would. I tend to mention those two composers when people ask me who inspires me. It's not as if I aspire to their music.
"But I aspire to something which is in their music. That ability to communicate that Shostakovich has, and that ability to find beautiful sounds that Feldman has."
André de Ridder conducts the NSO in Ian Wilson's An Angel Serves a Small Breakfast and Shining Forth and Peter Ruzicka's Tallis at the NCH this evening at 6.30 p.m. with a pre-concert talk at 5.45 p.m. Admission is free.
