Sometimes as a music critic you have to go outside the musical profession for advice. I have some friends who may be unfamiliar with the finer points of Bachian counterpoint or the mysteries of Beethovenian symphonic logic but know what they like on their favourite commercial radio station. They tell me that classical music at its best is a euphonious sound and there is nothing quite as exhilarating as hearing a string section in full flight. For them it is the ‘failure’ of composers in the twentieth century to conform to the sounding principles of Vivaldi and Pachelbel that probably best accounts for the absence of twentieth-century music from the majority of present-day concert programmes.
No one could accuse Karl Jenkins of making the same mistake in Imagined Oceans. His music is partly composed, partly produced. It simply wouldn’t be the same if his vocal lines weren’t drowning in artificial reverberation. And Jenkins pulls no punches with that dashing string orchestra sound, so suggestive of diamond advertisements and The Four Seasons.
Karl Jenkins may choose to associate himself with musicians who specialize in new music, but compositionally the tricks he plays here are some of the oldest in the book. When Michael Nyman, Arvo Part and John Tavener are discovered reinventing the wheel, they nevertheless go on to create a sound that is identifiably theirs and it is through this that we critics can sense their compositional integrity. Jenkins, on the other hand, seems entirely oblivious to the need in the classical music world to suggest natural talent or burning conviction in the way he sets about composing. He does, however, understand the imperative, no doubt for commercial reasons, to characterize his music as being ‘new’.
Even if Imagined Oceans seems at times more like a strangely assorted collection of hand-me-downs than the product of an authentic compositional voice, I could have imagined it turning out a lot worse than this. Whatever doubts I have about his work’s originality, Jenkins is unquestionably a musician. His sense of harmony gives him the ability to lift his music from time to time up from the purely banal to the banal but interesting. His production makes an interesting feature of blending the sound of the solo recorder – enchantingly played by Pamela Thorby – with the three women’s voices, whose alarmingly virtuosic Swingle-like swoops (whether sampled or sung I cannot say!) will certainly be difficult to realize in the heat of a live performance.
Two versions of the rhythmically most exciting piece, “Mare Crisum”, act as a frame for this well-planned CD, whose 12th piece, “Lacus Temporis”, forms the emotional climax of the whole work. In general, few of the individual pieces outstay their welcome, although I suspect that just five minutes of “Lacus Pereventiae” (“Lake of Perseverance”) would be heavy going for even the most hardened Jenkins enthusiast, let alone my poor friends.
With Nic Pendlebury drawing rich sounds from the strings of the Karl Jenkins Ensemble, only the percussion contributions seem to let the side down. Stranded in the mix from the rest of the ensemble, they sound incongruously Latin, as if the composer had inadvisedly tried out some samba grooves at the last minute on his sequencer programme. '