‘Just a lot of cloying tunes’: Sir Karl Jenkins may well be the world’s most performed living classical composer, but it’s back to Mozart for me!
Karl Jenkins: Piano
The Very Best Of Karl Jenkins
Rating: 
Sir Karl Jenkins, reputedly the world’s most performed living classical composer, was 75 last month.
Decca celebrates this milestone by issuing a newly recorded album Karl Jenkins: Piano, in which he plods his way through his biggest hits at his own keyboard, and a double album, The Very Best Of Karl Jenkins.
I had never listened to a Jenkins piece before submerging myself in these CDs. I was bemused that his kick-off album Adiemus, which projected him from a jazz-playing, advertising-jingle composer to the top of the classical charts (though it’s not a classical piece!), has now achieved 17 gold and two platinum discs.
Karl Jenkins is a top-melodic- line composer; there’s nothing much in the way of harmony. Just a lot of cloying tunes, which make you feel as if you’ve eaten a whole chocolate cake
It sounds pretty ordinary to me.
Similarly, that his choral piece The Armed Man has been performed more than 2,500 times, and the album has been in the UK classical charts for 800 weeks, only goes to prove the validity of the celebrated dictum that no one loses money under-estimating public taste.
Jenkins is a top-melodic- line composer; there’s nothing much in the way of harmony. Just a lot of cloying tunes, which make you feel as if you’ve eaten a whole chocolate cake at a single sitting.
Melody-wise, he reminds me a bit of John Rutter, the Christmas carol king, though Rutter is a much more sophisticated harmonist.
Jenkins’s livelier passages, like the Sancta Mater, are much influenced by Carl Orff. Similarly, the Pie Jesu for soprano and treble was surely inspired by a similar one from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem.
People are crying out for spiritual nourishment and Jenkins, to his credit, dishes up what they want. But it’s back to Mozart for me!