Karl Jenkins

Karl Jenkins worked in jazz with Graham Collier's band, then Nucleus and Soft Machine, playing oboe, saxophone and keyboards, before his later choral compositions. He grew up in Penclawdd on the Gower Peninsula, taught at the start by his father, a schoolmaster, organist and choirmaster, and studied at Cardiff University and the Royal Academy of Music. Adiemus, launched in 1995, set classical vocal writing and percussion to an invented phonetic language. The first movement of Palladio was adapted for an advertising campaign. The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace was composed in 1999 against the background of the Kosovo conflict. Requiem, Stabat Mater, Gloria, One World and Cantata Memoria — written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Aberfan disaster — followed. He was knighted in 2015 for services to composing and to crossing musical genres. Nucleus took first prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1970, and he joined Soft Machine in 1972. The Armed Man was a Royal Armouries commission for the millennium celebrations, and beside the Latin ordinary it sets the old L'Homme armé tune, lines from Kipling and Tennyson, the Mahabharata and the Hiroshima survivor Toge Sankichi. In 2015 Classic FM named him the most popular living composer.