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Karl JENKINS (b.1944)
The Peacemakers (2011)
Lucy Crowe (soprano), Chloë Hanslip (violin), Ashwin Shrinivasan
(bansuri), Gareth Davies (flute), Davy Spillane (uillean pipes),
Nigel Hitchcock (soprano saxophone), Laurence Cottle (bass guitar),
Clive Bell (shakuhachi), Jody K Jenkins (ethnic percussion), Berlin
Radio Choir, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Chorus, Really
Big Chorus (1000 voices), London Symphony Orchestra/Karl Jenkins
rec. various venues, London, Berlin, Ireland, April-June 2011
EMI CLASSICS 0843782 [72.42]
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In the late twentieth century a new phenomenon appeared in the
field of classical music, something that fitted comfortably
into neither of the old and recognised categories of ‘light’
or ‘serious’ music, although it was more ‘serious’ than ‘light’.
These were works that espoused earnest and heartfelt moral and
spiritual intentions, but avoided the acerbities of the more
avant-garde school of classical composers. The first
work of this type to achieve widespread popular acclaim was
Górecki’s Third Symphony, which had already won recognition
from a small number of aficionados since it was written
in 1976 but which suddenly became a worldwide bestseller in
the Nonesuch recording by Dawn Upshaw. It was followed by a
more widespread interest in the music of Arvo Pärt, who had
also been around for some years. In recent years the major contributions
in this field have come from Britain, and in particular from
composers such as Howard Goodall and Karl Jenkins. These composers
have managed to achieve massive popular appeal without abandoning
the basic tenets of ‘serious’ classical music. The sleeve-note
for this issue informs us that Karl Jenkins is now “the world’s
most performed living composer” thanks largely to over 1000
performances of his The Armed Man: A mass for peace
since its première in 2000.
The Peacemakers, the composer informs us, is a successor
to The Armed Man and a continuing plea for the peace
that continues to elude the world. He takes texts from a huge
variety of sources, amasses recordings from a number of different
locations assembling them in the studio, and employs a quite
alarming variety of styles in each of the different movements.
In order to expedite future performances, the booklet lists
seven ways in which the work can be shortened or otherwise re-scored
to allow for choirs to take the piece into their repertory.
If so many of the elements in the work are optional, one is
forced to wonder, what would be left? On the other hand a performance
including all the forces included on this disc would be totally
impracticable; and in fact was totally impracticable,
since this performance was assembled from so many different
recording sessions.
There is a very real problem with this sort of assembled performance.
In order for all the elements to fit together, they have to
be shoe-horned into the prescribed time-frame of an overall
soundtrack. This means that any slight deviations of tempo from
that framework must be avoided, so that all the recorded elements
can be welded together subsequently. Under the circumstances
it can be no surprise that there is an element of autopilot
discernible in the performances. The repeated phrases of Amen
at the end of the movement Healing light: a Celtic prayer
are desperately longing to be allowed to breathe and slow down
slightly to allow the music to descend towards the sense of
rest it so ardently desires. The choir in Berlin recorded in
April 2011 have to keep pace with the prescribed speed to allow
the orchestra to be added in June 2011 at sessions in London.
That the whole hangs together is a testimony to the professionalism
of the performers, not least the composer himself as conductor;
but there is a real price to be paid in terms of loss of spontaneity.
This is even more noticeable when the following movement Meditation
is allowed a natural ritenuto at the end, presumably
because the solo soprano was present at the recording at the
same time as the orchestra. This latter movement, by the way,
uses a poem by Terry Waite which is praiseworthy enough in its
sentiments but is expressed in words of alarming banality. There
are similar problems with some of the other texts set in English
translations by deservedly anonymous translators.
This has been preceded by a number of settings of words by other
‘peacemakers’ including some rather fine settings of words by
Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, although with the setting of lines
from Shelley’s Elegy on the Death of John Keats it
is rather startling to find the writer of The Mask of Anarchy
treated as a peacemaker, nor does one think that Shelley himself
would have recognised the soubriquet.
The centrepiece of any work by Karl Jenkins, it seems, has to
be a movement for a solo string player which can be extracted
and presented as a separate item for broadcast or publicity
purposes. In The Armed Man it took the form of a solo
for Julian Lloyd Webber on cello; here we have a piece written
for Chloë Hanslip entitled Solitude, pleasant enough
but totally unconnected to the rest of the work - the advice
for future performances even suggests that it can be omitted
altogether! Its sense of Szymanowski-like rapture is not a patch
on its model from The Armed Man, which was also linked
to the rest of the work by the use of the chorus, which we are
denied here. It is a very nice piece, and Hanslip plays it very
well, but its commercial purpose seems all too obvious.
There are also problems with some of the more upbeat music.
The Fanfara, setting the single word Peace
in a total of twenty-one different identified languages with
a sometimes startling disregard for their proper accentuation,
is relatively short and harmless. The intermezzo Solitude
is succeeded by a lengthy movement Fiat pax which sounds
at best like an echo of Bloch’s Sacred Service and
at worst like a passage from a particularly overblown Biblical
epic of the 1940s (the 1000 voices of the Really Big Choir having
to be recorded in five separate shifts of 200 voices each).
The words by Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer, among others,
are totally overwhelmed by this. Surely the whole point of gigantic
choirs like this is the emotional temperature that is raised
by the sheer scale of the enterprise. Recording them in smaller
batches surely undoes half the point of the exercise? The following
He had a dream, paraphrasing Martin Luther King and
welding his words with Every valley, opens with a passage
for the saxophone which recalls irresistibly the collaborations
of Jan Garbarek with the Hilliard Ensemble from the 1990s (ECM).
Hitchcock’s improvisations are fine, but inevitably sound second-hand
since we have heard this sort of thing so often before.
The dove features a nicely sung solo by a boy treble
- presumably from the CBSO Youth Chorus - and it seems rather
mean, when so many other artists are named as taking part in
this recording, that he is left anonymous. Again one feels the
straitjacket of overdubbing, with the choir and solo violin
recorded five days before the flute and orchestra were added.
One longs for a bit of give-and-take in the persistently rocking
accompaniment, even the slightest hint of rubato.
No more war comes as a quite a shock after the rather
beautiful setting of the Peace Prayer of St Francis of Assisi
- the attribution of authorship is incorrect; the words did
not appear until the twentieth century. We have a background
of ethnic drums to a chorus accompanied by pizzicato
strings, to which in due course further saxophone improvisations
are added together with the children’s chorus. Here the necessary
rhythmic precision works to advantage but the movement does
not sound like part of the whole. This is reinforced by the
following movement Let there be justice for all, setting
a very well-chosen passage by Nelson Mandela to a finely honed
vocal line from the chorus with a very effective accompaniment
spiced with African ethnic music. This is one of the best movements
in the piece, and it rises to a really magnificent climax before
it dies away rather too abruptly in the marimbas. One can imagine
it could have been even better if the climax had been allowed
a bit more room to expand.
The final movement uses the 1000 voices in their quintuply-dubbed
appearance in a movement that starts off like Elgar’s Coronation
Ode, moves with rapid speed to Praise ye from
Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast, and then back to Elgar
again. “Pray for peace” say the words by the composer’s wife;
but the music speaks of grandiosity, not of any sense of prayer
or of peace. The children’s choir interrupt from a distance
(echoes of Britten’s War Requiem) with the words of
Ann Frank: “How wonderful it is that no one need wait a single
moment before starting to improve the world” – but the word
“single” is extended over a long melismatic phrase that is very
far from singular. Then the Elgar-Walton combination comes back
in its full pomposity. Britten at the end of his War Requiem
managed this sort of synthesis of different layers of sound,
but it comes as the result of a hard-fought struggle. Karl Jenkins
here simply piles his elements together with the sense of triumph
that seems all too easy. Perhaps what we really long for is
a big tune to round it all off, like Elgar does in the Coronation
Ode; but there can only be one Land of hope and glory,
after all.
Karl Jenkins does not need a good or a bad review to make certain
that The Peacemakers will be taken up enthusiastically
by choral societies around the world. It will make its way quite
well with total indifference to the praises and curses of the
critics. It has to be said that this is a less unified work
than The Armed Man, and the many different pieces do
not add up to a sense of an inevitable whole. The many excellent
elements do not cohere, and the climactic moments are at once
too easy and too overblown.
The individual performances from everybody involved are excellent,
and one must note in particular the faultless English enunciation
and idiom of the Berlin chorus. The recording, within the limits
imposed by its artificial method of construction, is spacious
and convincing.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
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