FIELD NOTES – Concert of the Belgrade Irish Festival
As part of the 14th Belgrade Irish Festival, violinist Dušica Mladenović and harpist Mina Ćapin will present first time in Serbia two recent pieces by Irish composer Ian Willson.
Program:
Ian Wilson
Ground Out for violin, harp and samples (2019)*
The Weight of Margins for violin and soundtrack (2025)*
*Serbian premier
About program:
Ground Out (2019) is a work for violin, harp and samples, the result of a six-month project examining the effects of climate change on how the Irish produce and consume our food. “Ground Out” features music of great lyricism for an unusual combination of instruments, while the work’s soundtrack contains fragments of interviews Wilson conducted with local experts on the subject and field recordings made around Laois. The whole works together to be both a beguiling and absorbing musical entertainment as well as a kind of audio documentary.
The Weight of Margins was a commission from the 2025 Border Biennale in Cavan. Given free reign, I decided to interview a number of people who had either grown up near the Northern Irish border, or who lived near it now, to hear their thoughts and feelings about it. I remained neutral, asking the same questions of everyone, teasing out their own thoughts without leading them in any particular direction. The results were, as expected, full of opinion, emotion and even philosophy. I edited the recorded conversations down
to what I felt were the most interesting excerpts, put them together on a soundtrack and then scored some violin music for my wife Dušica to play along with the soundtrack, to knit everything together with music.
Biographies:
Ian Wilson (Northern Ireland, 1964) has composed over 250 works including operas, a range of orchestral and chamber music, and multimedia pieces. His compositions have been performed and broadcast on six continents and presented at festivals including the BBC Proms, Venice Biennale, Warsaw Autumn and Gaudeamus and at venues such as New York’s Carnegie Hall, London’s Royal Albert Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Vienna’s Musikverein and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall. There are over 40 commercial recordings
of his music available. In 1998 he was elected to Aosdána, Ireland’s national association of creative artists, and he has been AHRB Research Fellow at the University of Ulster and An Foras Feasa post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Dundalk Institute of Technology as well as composerin-association with California’s Camerata Pacifica ensemble, the Ulster Orchestra and the Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble. He was director of the Sligo New Music Festival from 2003 to 2011.
Ian Wilson’s music is published by UMP, G. Ricordi & Co. and Universal Edition.
Violinist Dušica Mladenović is renowned for her commitment to contemporary repertoire and has premiered many of her husband Ian Wilson’s works.
Mina Ćapin, principal harp of the Belgrade Philharmonic, is celebrated for her expressive chamber and solo performances.