AT Dublin's National Concert Hall on Friday, 15 March, the confluence of a composer, a performer and a storied instrument will culminate in the premiere of a new cello concerto by John Kinsella, just a few weeks shy of his seventieth birthday. Mexican cellist Carlos Prieto, in his fourth visit to Ireland since first coming in 1997, will be the soloist, playing upon his 282-year-old Stradivarius which spent a large chunk of the nineteenth century residing in Ireland.

Kinsella recalls hearing about the 'Red Cello' for the first time. 'A friend of mine (Bill Drakeford) does a Sunday morning show on Anna Livia Radio, and he had Carlos on some years back, talking about his Stradivarius cello. It's a very fine instrument with a great story, and Carlos is a marvellous speaker. It got into the possession of the Piggott family here in Dublin and went through various ownerships and eventually ended up in Carlos's possession. So there's an Irish-Mexican connection through the cello.'

In fact the celebrity of the 'Piatti' cello -- nicknamed the Red Cello -- rivals that of its owner. Made in Cremona in 1720, the instrument's first journey was with an Italian opera orchestra which travelled to Cadiz in the south of Spain in 1762. There its exploits included being played in the first performance of Haydn's Seven Last Words of Our Redeemer on the Cross, a commission by Cadiz Cathedral for its Good Friday meditations in 1787. The cello's long Irish sojourn began in 1818 when it was bought in Cadiz by the Irish-born wine-merchant Allen Dowell. Dowell then sold the cello for 300 guineas to a Carlow clergyman who kept it for ten years before selling it on in 1831 to Samuel J. Piggott of Dublin's Piggott and Co., Musical Instrument Importers and Music Publishers. Piggott kept it until his death in 1853, at which point it was sold to an Englishman, Colonel Oliver, whose three cellos were cared for by the famous Italian cellist Alfredo Piatti. Oliver eventually made a present of the Stradivarius to Piatti, from whom the cello took the name which it still bears today.

From there it passed into the hands of the Mendelssohn family in 1901, with the composer's grandson eventually smuggling it past the Gestapo on the Swiss border during the Second World War. After that it crossed the Atlantic to New York where Francesco Mendelssohn gave it to the Marlborough Foundation in 1972. Then Carlos Prieto, who had been tracking the cello for some time, sold his Guarneri and was finally able to buy the Piatti in 1978. Believing truth to be stranger than fiction (such as François Giraud's 1999 film, The Red Violin, or the E. Annie Proulx novel, Accordion Crimes), Prieto researched his beloved cello's long and colourful life story which he then recounted in his book, Las Aventuras de un Violonchelo, Historias y Memorias, ('The Adventures of a Cello, History and Memories', Fondo de Cultura Económica (FTE), S. A. de C. V., 1998).

John Kinsella, impressed though he is with the calibre of the instrument on which the premiere of his new concerto will be played, is equally impressed by the player. 'Carlos played in the Hugh Lane Gallery on a Sunday morning early in 2000. And even though I'd known his playing from records and from his quartet recital in 1998, I wasn't quite aware of just how good he was until that solo concert. And he's really terrific. An extremely well controlled player, which gave me a lot of mental freedom to say, "This guy can play anything". Which takes away any inhibitions one might have in doing a solo work and wondering, "My God, am I going a bit over the top here?" '

Prieto, from one of Mexico's leading musical families, took up the cello at the age of four. As a teenager, however, he was accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA where he took degrees in both engineering and economics before embarking on a career in business and industry. 'After several years of work in the iron industry in Mexico,' he says, 'I became the head of a company, and of course, I was busy. After ten or twelve years of work, I decided that either I went back to the cello or I would never be able to do this and I would be sorry for the rest of my life.'

Having made his choice, and after studying with Pierre Fournier and Leonard Rose, he went on to become Mexico's classical music superstar. His performance profile includes solo appearances with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, the Spanish National Orchestra and many others. Recordings include the complete Bach suites, works by Shostakovich, Saint-Saens, Boccherini, Fauré, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Kodály, Bruch and Martinu and, notably, eight CDs devoted to cello music from Latin America and Spain, whose music it is his special mission to promote. 'I've been trying to enlarge the cello repertoire of the Spanish-speaking world, also the Portuguese. I've been involved with composers from Spain, South America, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Puerto Rico, the United States, and Cuba.'

With a catalogue of over fifty chiefly Hispanic world premieres to his credit, Prieto began to think that a new Irish work would make an apt celebration of his wandering cello's Irish past. For advice and information on the Irish music scene he turned to an old friend from his Mexican childhood, another cellist with whom he had shared his first teacher. This was Daniel Dultzin, until 2001 Mexico's easygoing ambassador to Ireland, an enthusiastic concertgoer well known here in music and opera circles. Dultzin immediately insisted that Prieto come and play in Ireland, which he did, making his Irish debut in University College Cork's Aula Maxima in 1997. On that occasion he announced his wish for a new Irish concerto.

'Around that time,' says Kinsella, 'they [Prieto and Dultzin] must have gone to Eve O'Kelly at the Contemporary Music Centre. And then, probably by a process of elimination or whatever, she rang me. The idea was that I would get in touch with Daniel because Carlos was shortly returning to Ireland with a string quartet. So then Carlos and his family -- including a conductor son who played first violin -- arrived and gave a concert in the Peppercannister Church in Dublin. Afterwards we went out for a bit of supper and just talked about the whole idea. That's how it happened.

'And the other part of Daniel's juggling with the thing was to try and interest RTÉ in it. Which he managed all right.' So the cello concerto, Kinsella's second, was commissioned by Daniel Dultzin for Carlos Prieto and the Red Cello with funds provided by the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

Given this Irish-Mexican backdrop, Kinsella's earliest musings on the concerto included the possibility of alluding musically to the intriguing history of the instrument on which the premiere would be given. 'Daniel was always saying, "You know you have to have Mexican, Irish, and Spanish elements in this piece," which is of course one way that I could have done the piece. Indeed I got the score of the Haydn Seven Last Words and was looking through that. But it all came to nought really, and I ended up just writing my own piece. Not that I hadn't approached it broadly at the outset. But it just ended up being JK.'

The concerto is in two movements, played without a break and lasting about twenty-six minutes. 'The opening movement is a kind of fantasia: quite a lengthy work with a very long cadenza at the end which is kind of groping towards the second movement, the finale.

'I had done a violin concerto many years back and I had often thought that the finale was more suited to the cello. So I totally re-worked it for the new work. It's a kind of rondo movement -- lots of singing tunes which I thought were more apt on the cello with all its various colours and different registers. It's a great instrument. I think it's a superb vehicle for imagination.'

'Not that it ever struck me, but Fergus O'Carroll, who's copying the parts, said that in the fantasia the cello never stops! And it's almost literally true. So it's really a very solo-dependent work, very dominated by the cello.

'The mood is tranquil but very busy. Quiet, but it does have outbursts. It starts coming from nowhere with little phrases. And then the cadenza in the middle; and a singing tune which appears from time to time -- kind of an espressivo passage.

'And I took an idea from Shostakovich's Second Cello Concerto of a connecting cadenza which changes the mood of the preceding movement into the mood of the following movement. I unashamedly copied that idea! The upshot is a pretty lengthy cadenza which attempts to achieve that transition.'

It's been six years since Kinsella did an interview with New Music News in 1996. At that time he was fresh from recording sessions with Naxos who subsequently released a disc of his Third and Fourth Symphonies with the National Symphony Orchestra under Proinnsías Ó Duinn. At that time also he was completing his Sixth Symphony, last of a series of RTÉ commissions which were part of his retirement package when he retired as RTÉ's Director of Music in 1988. Until quite recently he has been keeping up a steady output, sticking fairly regimentally to his all-morning composing routine (although now in a small studio at the bottom of his garden).

He reckons there's been little in the way of stylistic change since 1996, but that he has been experimenting with different formal aspects. 'The Fifth Symphony, for instance, was about the 1916 poets and required a speaker. Some people would say that if you use a speaker, it ceases to be a symphony. So I used a singer and a speaker. But I had a very closely worked-out harmonic scheme for that which went around in a circle and came back again. So it was pretty tightly written from my point of view, and I would claim that it could qualify as a symphony.

'Then in the Sixth I was using spatial effects. I had three French horns placed around the top of the concert hall: two at the back, one each at the corners behind the organ, and the third horn halfway down the right-hand side, in among the audience. So that was another idea.

'And the Seventh was an attempt to write a highly condensed work. And I got it down to about twenty-five minutes, four minutes short of my target. It was a commission from the Cork School of Music Symphony Orchestra, and it was performed in Cork and Waterford. I was happy enough with that piece, and they did a great job on it. Super group, Adrian Petcu conducting.

'There was to be a small, off-stage wordless choir towards the end. Geoffrey Spratt (director of the Cork School of Music), as usual a man who seems able to organise anything, had some choral works in the concert as well, with the Fleischmann Choir who are about 150-strong. And without saying anything to me he packed the whole 150 into a small room at the back of the altar in the church! And it made the most amazing sound, this huge group behind the orchestra, singing very quietly. It added a kind of richness to the sonority without adding anything to the dynamic. I have a very good recording of it which Darby Carroll did for the Contemporary Music Centre. So it's available to listen to at the Centre.'

In 1998, just around the time when he was thinking about the new cello concerto for Carlos Prieto, he was completing work on his Eighth Symphony. 'It took a hell of a lot out of me,' says Kinsella, 'physically and probably mentally. It was a long work. Again, it was a different kind of formal layout that I was trying for, the exact opposite of the short Seventh: rather than condensing, I was trying to expand ideas into a one-movement work. And I actually wrote it twice: I went right over it again. And I'm getting older. I suppose that's another feature.'

With that in mind he professes now to be slightly freer in his formerly strict regime. He maintains that he has eased off since completing the cello concerto, which could conceivably end up as being his last big work. 'I just stood back from the whole business of composing. I don't think I'd work to commissions anymore. I've a whole new view of my position and of life generally.'

And yet... He recalls saying in his last New Music News interview how he would love to write a seventh symphony, thereby matching Sibelius, one of his heroes. Since then, of course, he has not only matched Sibelius but also Schubert with his Eighth. Which leaves Beethoven tantalisingly close. Would it not be a shame to retire from composing without writing a ninth symphony?