Belfast composer Ian Wilson, subject of the latest concert in the National Symphony Orchestra's Horizons series, conducted by André de Ridder on Tuesday, chose to frame an orchestral work by German composer Peter Ruzicka with two concertos of his own.

Wilson seems to be really taken with the idea of writing concertos. His next, a work for marimba, will be his seventh.

Tuesday's programme included his second violin concerto, an angel serves a small breakfast, and a concerto for cello, Shining Forth, both of them inspired by the work of visual artists - Paul Klee and Barnett Newman, respectively. The dominant style of writing in the violin concerto has the orchestral instruments following the solo line like a sort of vapour trail, or a smeared shadow, that spreads like fibrillating pigment from a paintbrush drawn through a transparent solvent.

It's a technique often favoured these days to create distancing effects of haloed remembrance, and in Wilson's concerto it is carefully juxtaposed against a central section in which the accompaniment to the soloist's ever-flowing line - ably negotiated by Rebecca Hirsch - is more strictly chordal.

Shining Forth was inspired "by the Catholic Liturgy's 14 Stations of the Cross, both structurally and emotionally". Musically, the manner is of an awkward or even deformed neo-classicism.

The bones of any number of early 20th-century skeletons can be felt to protrude in a work which has a consistent, and not entirely convincing, atmosphere of the grotesque. Robin Thompson-Clarke's solo playing, though uneven, had many moments of beautiful detail. Peter Ruzicka's music about music - Thomas Tallis's 40-part motet, Spem in alium in the case of the orchestral work, Tallis - has been an important influence on Wilson in recent years, a liberating force opening up new horizons. For Wilson, the attraction is the way he feels that Ruzicka manages to integrate the pre-existing material organically, so that it sounds less a quotation than a germ around which a coherent new reality has been created.

I'm not sure that André de Ridder and the NSO managed quite the sophistication of layering that Ruzicka's Tallis seems to demand.

But they certainly made enough of an impression for listeners to see why Wilson should have become so intrigued by the technique.

Rebecca Hirsch (violin), Robin Thompson-Clarke (cello)

an angel serves a small breakfast....... Ian Wilson

Tallis............................................... Peter Ruzicka Shining Forth ...................................... Ian Wilson