"An ascetic with the temperament of a maximalist, with the reserve of a repressed Vesuvius" is how Rodion Shchedrin once summed up the musical character of the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli (right).
Kancheli, now in his mid-60s, began to come to attention in the West at the end of the Soviet era, as a composer who had somehow always contrived to follow an independent path whatever the pressures which confronted him.
His highly-individual, spiritually-motivated music, with its unusual extremes of stillness and violence, makes a first concert appearance in Ireland at the NCH on Friday, when Alexander Anissimov conducts the NSO in the "liturgy", Mourned by the Wind, with Daniel Raiskin as the viola soloist.
Also in the programme is Alexander Mossolov's 1920s industrial celebration, Zavod, (known in English as The Iron Foundry) and Shostakovich's war-time Eighth Symphony.
