Henry Mancini, John Barry, John Williams, Lalo Schifrin: composers whose work has become as memorable as the show or film it was written for – music that arguably defines the era in which it was made.

One such score is Lalo Schifrin's theme to Mission: Impossible which has made it onto more mobile phones and videogames than one thought imaginable. But Schifrin is no one-hit wonder, a fact you may discover next Sunday if you go to the National Concert Hall.

Now aged 77, the Argentinian composer, conductor and pianist will be coming to Ireland for the first time to conduct and play piano to some of his most famous pieces of music. And believe me, he has quite a few to choose from – Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt, Dirty Harry, Magnum Force and The Eagle Has Landed to name but a few. And then there's his TV work: The Man from UNCLE, Mannix, Planet of the Apes. The list is almost exhausting.

"I've never been to Ireland," Schifrin said last week. "But my friends tell me it's a beautiful place and I have a lot of friends there. None of them are musicians though. They are all pipe smokers."

An idle search on YouTube is like taking a tour through the musical mind of Schifrin – not to mention the jazzy sound of late 1960s/'70s TV themes. Having studied sociology in Buenos Aires, Schifrin won a scholarship to Paris where he studied classical composition, indulging his passion for jazz in 1950s Paris nightclubs. This led to a chance meeting with Dizzy Gillespie and a trip to New York where he joined Gillespie's band as his pianist. Soon Hollywood came calling and long associations with the likes of Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and, in particular, Clint Eastwood.

"When I worked on Bullitt I was trying to get inside the personality of Steve McQueen's character: an introvert but deeply emotional character. I needed to get the music to reflect this. With Dirty Harry I was dealing with something else entirely: a much more extroverted, action character. With all my work the emphasis is on subtext – not what you see but what you don't see."

Having scored Coogan's Bluff in 1968, Schifrin later wrote the themes to Magnum Force, Dirty Harry and The Dead Pool for Eastwood. He will be playing a selection of these plus arrangements by some of his peers, including John Barry's James Bond theme tune and Ennio Morricone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. One he may not play is his original theme to The Exorcist, something of a sore spot in his career.

"I was asked to score the movie and the music was very scary," he says. "At the test screening some of the audience began to feel ill. I'm not joking. When Reagan's head starts turning and when she vomits, some of the audience started turning green themselves. Some even had to leave the theatre they were so sick. So the studio became concerned and felt they needed to tone the movie down and they concentrated on the score."

The problem was they never told Schifrin and it took him a while, for legal reasons, even to talk about it.

"It was not a good situation but you know I've had a lot of triumphs and only one real defeat. Even Alexander the Great and Napoleon experienced defeat but they had a lot more triumphs."

Another 'defeat', which I neglect to mention out of politeness, is Schifrin's original theme to Starsky and Hutch, which was much more gritty and violent than its heir, the funky 'Gotcha' theme that became synonymous with the 1970s cop show.

One suite he will be performing is Enter the Dragon. Schifrin was asked to score Bruce Lee's swansong and found it one of the more difficult scores.

"When the film was being made he said he wanted to meet me but I was too busy. With an action movie there is so much music to write, so many notes because there are so many actors and so much movement. But Lee was such a hero. He told me about how he travelled the world learning all the schools of martial arts – India, Korea, Japan. I was so sorry when he died."

Lalo Schifrin plays the National Concert Hall next Sunday