Requiem, by composer Karl Jenkins, is likely to get a great reception when it makes its Irish premiere this week, writes Arminta Wallace.
If you were asked to name the top 10 British composers, where would you start? Elgar, perhaps? Benjamin Britten, maybe? Vaughan Williams? The name Karl Jenkins probably wouldn't spring immediately to mind - but maybe it should.
Of course, it depends what you mean by "top": but when it comes to popular polls and record sales, Jenkins is right up there with the best of them. In Classic FM's Hall of Fame 2006, he's to be found perched at number one in the list of "top works by living composers", ahead of John Rutter, John Williams, Philip Glass and Peter Maxwell Davies. And as sales of classical albums continue to slip lower and lower, he seems to sell merrily on; at one point last May there were no fewer than three Jenkins albums in the classical charts.
Critics are sniffy about Jenkins's eclectic style, not to mention his background in rock bands and TV commercials - but audiences love him. They especially love The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, which has established itself firmly on the live circuit, with more than 100 performances all over the world since its premiere in 2001. The work takes the jaunty 15th-century French song L'Homme Armé as the starting point for an exploration of the theme of war and peace in the 20th century, incorporating such diverse musical elements as a muezzin's call, references to Palestrina's polyphony and Brazilian percussive rhythms. It also combines the standard texts of the Latin Mass with poems by Mallory, Dryden, Swift and Kipling and chunks of the Hindu scriptures.
The Armed Man drew "prolonged shouts of approval from the audience" on its first outing and has continued to wow audiences ever since - a rare feat for a contemporary piece. When Our Lady's Choral Society performed the work at the National Concert Hall last year, it once again scored a major hit, which has prompted the choir to schedule the Irish premiere of another slice of Jenkins - his Requiem - for Wednesday.
How did they get into Jenkins to begin with? Conductor Proinnsias Ó Duinn says it was his doing. "Every year I ask the choir if there's anything they're particularly looking forward to doing," he explains. "I'll always take on board whatever people want, and I'll take a look at the music, to see if it's practical. Somebody suggested The Armed Man and I said: 'Well, why not?' Then the choir enjoyed singing it so much that they said: 'Why don't we take a look at the Requiem?'"
An experienced conductor who has worked his way through all kinds of musical styles with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra over the years as well as his regular appearances with Our Lady's, Ó Duinn insists that Jenkins's music has intrinsic worth.
He was the subject of a recent edition of ITV's The South Bank Show - a kind of artistic rite of passage in itself - where he had some tart words for his adversaries in the world of contemporary music. "He spoke about when he was going through college," says Ó Duinn. "His teachers wanted him to go to London and study composition. And he said: 'Become a barbed-wire character? I had no interest in that . . . '" A barbed-wire character is - presumably - someone who takes the five lines and four spaces on which music is written and turns them into something sharp, spiky and off-putting. As a definition of contemporary music it's simplistic and unfair - lots of contemporary music is perfectly accessible, and many more pieces would be accessible if only they were played a bit more often - but it offers an interesting insight into Jenkins's musical modus operandi.
"Jenkins writes from the heart," says Ó Duinn. "Like Mozart did in his day - for the people of the day. He has suffered a little bit of criticism on that front, but he's hugely successful internationally - thus proving that you don't have to go 'barbed-wire', or write a piece scored for 500 tubas and a piccolo, to be different. He has produced music that is different. It's very much his own. You can hear it right away. After a few bars, you say: 'That's Jenkins'. You might hear something behind an ad on television, and you say: 'That's Jenkins'."
Having conducted The Armed Man and worked on the Requiem, what would Ó Duinn see as Jenkins's musical strengths? "He writes in a very intelligent manner, " he says. "He writes well for voices, and he writes well in relation to words and voice. The music is also very balanced. You can clearly hear what he wants you to hear without delving through thick, muddy textures. And he's a good builder of structures - the highs and lows are right."
While The Armed Man uses everything from the chilling sound of marching feet to images of mass slaughter to pack its emotional punch, the Requiem form, devised as a musical meditation on the theme of death, needs no extra dimension to heighten its impact. For the 120 members of Our Lady's Choral Society, however, the recent death of one of their colleagues, a mother of three in her late 30s, is bound to give this particular performance an added poignancy. "She was a very enthusiastic singer who had been studying this music with us, so it will be a very emotional occasion for the choir now," says Ó Duinn.
But, he adds, the emotion of Jenkins's piece is reined in by its clever interweaving of the classic poetic form of the Japanese haiku into the standard texts of the Requiem Mass. "When I was a music student studying the cello," he says, "my teacher said to me, 'I'm going to bring in some Japanese paintings and I want you to try and phrase like that - in terms of the lines and the logical connections of lines and the peace that's behind them'. Jenkins has done that beautifully in his Requiem."
Our Lady's Choral Society and the National Sinfonia, conducted by Proinnsias Ó Duinn, in association with Lyric FM, will give the Irish premiere of Karl Jenkins's Requiem at the National Concert Hall on Wednesday. The concert will also feature works by Mozart, Salieri and Michael Haydn; soloists will be soprano Colette Boushell and boy soprano Hugh Byrne