More often than not, when a classically trained and academically educated rock musician issues a symphonically-slanted album, it’s to massage their ambition rather than signal a career change but since Karl Jenkins parted ways with SOFT MACHINE there was no looking back, and it wasn’t his adventures with the Canterbury legends that the Welsh composer got a knighthood in 2015. The list of Sir Karl’s works is long and is about to become longer on June 16th once “One World” sees the light of day.
One World
Commissioned by the World Choir for Peace and the World Orchestra for Peace and composed in 2021-2022, during the pandemic – and that’s why two of its movements feature the Stay At Home Choir, a global community formed in the UK during the first Covid-19 lockdown to digitally bring singers together – this opus may not pick up where the magnificent “Miserere: Songs Of Mercy And Redemption” left off in 2019, but it’s just as impressive in its call for unity. Jenkins was inspired by literary sources – as diverse as the Bible, the Gayatri Mantra and the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Frances Harper and Khalil Gibran.
He says, “In 1998, I was commissioned to write a piece, ‘The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace’, that was to herald a new millennium with the hope of a lasting period of peace. The war in the Balkans was happening while I was composing, which is why I dedicated that work to the victims of Kosovo. Twenty odd years since writing ‘The Armed Man,’ and three thousand performances later, little has changed and if anything, the global situation has worsened; another war in Europe and a fractured world in so many ways.”
