All this week on Classic Drive, Lorcan will feature music from 'The very best of Karl Jenkins 80th Birthday Edition'.

The extraordinarily diverse output of composer Karl Jenkins has encompassed genres as numerous as jazz, rock, film music, advertising music, New Age music, and classical composition, largely choral.

In the '80s and '90s, Jenkins enjoyed a successful career as a composer of music for advertising, winning two industry awards. Some of his advertising music later found its way into his classical compositions. The most significant example of this was his song Adiemus, which was sung by Miriam Stockley and first appeared in 1994 in a Delta Airlines ad. The song was a hit in its own right, and the material (later simply the concept) continued its life through five extraordinarily successful Adiemus albums (Songs of Sanctuary, Cantata Mundi, Dances of Time, The Eternal Knot, and Vocalise). These albums have been categorized as New Age or classical; they incorporate various influences from Celtic music, world music, electronic music, and more into a basic theme. Just as successful has been The Armed Man (1999), a setting of the Catholic mass incorporating the medieval song The Armed Man (L'homme armé) along with other texts and musical materials. The mass has been performed by hundreds of choirs, many of them nonprofessional, in Britain and beyond. The Armed Man featured a 70-piece orchestra, and in the 21st century, Jenkins has focused on yet larger classical works. The giant choral work The Peacemakers (2014), with texts from Martin Luther King, Jr., the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Anne Frank, included a 1,000-voice choir called The Really Big Chorus on its 2012 debut recording. Jenkins' 2016 work Cantata Memoria: For the Children commemorated the victims of the Aberfan Disaster, a mine waste collapse in Wales that killed 116 children.

Works

  • Jenkins, K: Adiemus
  • Jenkins, K: Chorale: Cantilena
  • Jenkins, K: Gloria
  • Jenkins, K: Hymn
  • Jenkins, K: In These Stones Horizons Sing
  • Jenkins, K: Let's Go (The Tower Of Babel)
  • Jenkins, K: Miserere: Songs of Mercy and Redemption
  • Jenkins, K: Palladio: 1st movement
  • Jenkins, K: Requiem
  • Jenkins, K: Stabat Mater
  • Jenkins, K: Te Deum
  • Jenkins, K: The Armed Man - A Mass For Peace
  • Jenkins, K: The Peacemakers
  • Jenkins, K: Tikkun Olam (Repair the World)

Tune in at 5:20 everyday this week to hear a selection from this album on Lorcan Murray's Classic Drive.