On the same day, a documentary which follows Martin retracing the journey of Hugh O'Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, will be shown at 5.30pm on BBC2 and also on a giant screen in the Whitla Hall immediately before the performance.

"The whole thing is a bit of a Neil Fest," he admits. "But I'd be a rare kind of being if I didn't own up to feeling very excited about it."

He credits the inspiration for the project to former BBC producer Michael McGowan, who now works for the independent production company Imagine Media.

"Mickey came up to me in the Waterfront Hall after the premiere of my last big orchestral piece in 2004 and told me he had an idea," he says. "I would be commissioned to compose a major work about the Flight of the Earls and he would make a documentary about it.

"Now that may sound simple enough, but getting a major commission off the ground and making a television documentary are both very difficult things to pull off. But, true to his word, he made them happen and here we are.

" We linked up with the Belfast Philharmonic Choir, who put in a successful bid for Lottery funding, and then all I had to do was compose the thing."

The result is 'ossa', the Latin word for 'bones'. The title is written in lower case lettering because, as Martin says: "I like the look of it, the simplicity and symmetry of the word. It is the only word written below the name of Hugh O'Neill on his grave in the beautiful baroque church of St Pietro de Montorio in Rome."

In the course of a year's research, Martin navigated O'Neill's perilous journey from Donegal to Normandy in France - where rough seas forced the Earls to make their first landing - and from there to Rome.

"They were bound for Spain, but because of the sensitivity of the political situation, they were not allowed to travel through France, so they headed east and finally arrived in Rome," explains Martin. The orchestra, the choir and a boy treble interpret the story of this turbulent voyage and O'Neill's frustration at the whole awful affair."

The piece echoes with the richly varied experience Martin has had since leaving Queen's University, Belfast in 1984, with a degree in music and Celtic studies.

Unusually, he is equally accomplished and at ease with classical and traditional music, as fine a performer on the cello as on the uilleann pipes. It is something he attributes to his parents' eclectic musical tastes.

"While they were not musicians, they were real music lovers. My father was mad about jazz and introduced me to Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith and the Creole jazz musician, Kid Ory. They loved the Beatles, Ry Cooder, Seamus Ennis, Sean O Riada. There were no such thing as musical boundaries.

" When I left Queen's I had no real notion of what I was going to do. But I was doing a bit of peripatetic teaching of the cello and gigging around, playing the uilleann pipes. So I kind of continued on from there really."

Unplanned it may have been, but his career as composer, performer and producer has taken him to some of the world's great concert halls, recording studios, theatres and open-air arenas.

And the music continues at home in Lansdowne Road in north Belfast, the area where he has lived all his life. His wife Siobhan, whom he met at a fleadh in Portglenone in 1976 and who was a fellow student at Queen's, is a fine singer and pianist. And their daughters - Maebh (15), Sarah (14) and Molly (11) - are musical, too.

"It is quite wonderful to see the music coming out in them," he says. "Maebh is already a very good arranger. I've no idea where she gets it because I have never taught her. Our son, Neil óg, is only six-years-old and a right wee character. It's too soon to tell with him yet."

Martin's free-wheeling tastes and exceptional talent, mischievous personality and outrageous sense of humour have made him friends right across the international arts world, among them actor Stephen Rea, opera singer Bryn Terfel, playwright Trevor Griffths and Brendan Graham, who composed the song You Raise Me Up. And he is currently working with actress Pauline McLynn on a new opera about her father.

Among his treasured memories are performing to 40,000 people in Hyde Park with Terfel, (with whom he will be recording in 2008), appearing at New York's Carnegie Hall, standing on the pitch at Celtic Park in Glasgow to record the crowd singing for the play Paradise and, through the formation of the West Ocean Quartet, finding a unique new voice for the cello in Irish traditional music.

Best of all for this devoted family man was the gathering of his entire clan for the premiere at the 2004 Belfast Festival of 'no tongue can tell', his musical tribute to his maternal grandparents, for which his former teacher and mentor, the legendary uilleann piper Liam O'Flynn, was the soloist. On Sunday the journey continues.