The Messiah season is almost upon us: another month or so, and we'll be up to our elbows in Hallelujah Choruses and All Ye Like Sheeps. Our Lady's Choral Society is one of the stalwart groups which can be relied upon, year in and year out, to give Handel's hardy perennial plenty of vocal welly.
There's nothing wrong with that, of course: does exactly what it says on the tin, does Messiah, and does it again and again and again, without fail. But is there some musical X factor which ensures that certain choral works turn up on programmes with impressive regularity, while others languish in relative silence?
If there is, Karl Jenkins's The Armed Man: a Mass for Peace seems to possess it in spades. Commissioned by the Royal Armouries of Great Britain to mark the new millennium, its eclectic blend of Kipling, Kyrie and more has proved enormously popular with audiences. The hour-long piece has been presented live more than 100 times since its première (including a performance by the Dublin County Choir in 2003). This counts as meteoric success in a musical world where most new compositions never even get a second outing.
When it was released on CD, the recording promptly became a bestseller, and in a radio poll last year, listeners to Britain's Classic FM voted The Armed Man the eighth best piece of classical music ever, putting its composer, a former jazz-rock musician turned advertising jingle-writer, into the musical company of Mozart, Rachmaninov and Elgar. What's the secret? "I think it's well-constructed," says the composer, in an interview published on his website, wwwkarljenkins.com. "And - old-fashioned word - I think it's tuneful."
Tunes are second nature to Jenkins, who has never subscribed to the atonal approach to composition. As a youngster he played the oboe in the National Youth Orchestra of Wales; in his teens he took to jazz before spending a period with the way-out Seventies rock band Soft Machine. Then he went into advertising, producing award-winning music for Levi's, British Airways, De Beers and Pepsi, among others. Remember the ad with the guy taking off his Levi's in the laundrette? You probably thought the soundtrack was by Marvin Gaye. It wasn't. It was Jenkins, with the help of a singer from Barbados called Tony Jackson. In recent years, Jenkins is best known for his recordings with the Finnish choir Adiemus, which have topped classical and pop charts around the world. He has continued to defy musical boundaries, writing everything from a score for the television series The Celts to a marimba concerto for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie and an Ave Verum for the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel.
The sound-world of The Armed Man is certainly unusual - and unusually accessible. It uses everything from Gregorian plainchant to gorgeous, Rutter-esque harmonies to achieve its musical effects, and blends standard texts of the Latin Mass - the Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and Benedictus - with a muezzin's call (in Arabic), a chunk of the ancient Indian epic The Mahabharata, a generous helping of Tennyson's Le Morte d'Arthur, and various slices from the Psalms.
As the man who commissioned it, Guy Wilson of the Royal Armouries, explains, the basis for the entire concept is a 15-century song called L'Homme Armé which was written at the court of the Burgundian King Charles the Bold. "The armed man must be feared" runs the text - and so popular did the melody prove that it became commonplace for composers, especially composers of Masses, to quote it in their work. Palestrina's Missa L'Homme Armé is just one of many such Masses, and its exquisite Kyrie is, in turn, quoted by Jenkins in The Armed Man.
"The theme that 'the armed man must be feared' seemed to me painfully relevant to the 20th century, and so the idea was born to commission a modern Armed Man Mass," writes Wilson in the sleeve notes for the CD. "What better way, within the framework of a Christian musical and liturgical form, both to look back and reflect as we leave behind the most war-torn and destructive century in human history, and to look ahead with hope and commit ourselves to a new and more peaceful millennium."
Paean to peace or not, The Armed Man is not above making use of the seductive rhythms of military music as it moves from the jaunty marching melody of L'Homme Armé in its opening movement to the straight talking of the Hebrew Psalms - "save me from bloody men" - through the horrors of Hiroshima. It ends, however, with a confident call to "Ring in the thousand years of peace", followed by a serene setting of the climactic lines from the Book of Revelation: "And there shall be no more death. . .
neither shall there be any more pain."
Musically and emotionally, it's a roller-coaster ride - and you can catch it at the National Concert Hall next Thursday, November 3rd, when Our Lady's Choral Society will perform The Armed Man, in the company of the National Sinfonia conducted by Proinnsías Ó Duinn. The other item on the programme is Luigi Cherubini's exquisite Requiem in C Minor (1816), a work greatly admired by Beethoven, Berlioz and Brahms. A welcome chance to hear a contemporary choral phenomenon, together with a rarely-performed masterpiece? Go on. If nothing else, it will cleanse your musical palate ahead of all those Messiahs.