Music And The Man

The composer on resisting pigeon-holing and the critics in his 75th-birthday year

- Claire Jackson

THE room is full of nearidentical youthful faces, which is most disconcerting. I blink, but the repetition remains. ‘There’s a casting agency downstairs,’ says Sir Karl Jenkins, by way of explanation, as we sit in his compact studio. ‘It can be a bit unsettling.’ So far, so Soho.

Sir Karl’s writing desk is state-of-the-art, in the heart of London’s creative hub, but the composer says he doesn’t need the hardware all that often—he works on a small, weighted keyboard and laptop, which he uses when working at home in Marylebone or back in his native Wales, which he visits regularly.

Sir Karl, who was born in Penclawdd on the Gower Peninsula, is one of the most frequently performed living composers. The Armed Man: A Mass For Peace, commissioned by the Royal Armouries and Classic FM for the millennium, has been in the UK classical charts for 15 years—not bad, considering many new classical works never even see a second performance.

‘I’m proud of The Armed Man,’ he says, quietly. ‘There are all sorts of silly statistics about my music.’ The most striking of these is that The Armed Man has been performed more than 2,500 times since its premiere in 1999. The work, which was dedicated to the victims of Kosovo, incorporates text from the Catholic Mass and the Islamic call to prayer, as well as secular writing from Kipling, Tennyson and Hiroshima surviver Sankichi Toge.