Powerful music to enrich the soul in troubling times …It’s Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man: a mass for Peace — performed by Margot Rejskind’s Island Choral Society, with soloist Hannah O’Donnell, and members of the Luminos Chamber Orchestra.
It is so easy to be discouraged: we are plagued by wars — Gaza and the West Bank, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo — and by the appalling shake-up of North America and the world order. Here is music that expresses our feelings.
Writing in part to honour victims of the savage war in Kosovo (1998/99), Jenkins created a progression of moods which runs from martial bravado, through the ghastly horrors of war, to a resolution in joyous peace. It is set in the framework of a church mass — with a Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and Benedictus — but its sections draw on texts and tunes from a fascinating range of other religious and historical sources. Starting with a threatening march to a 15th-century French folk song “The Armed Man is to be feared”, there are parts from the Psalms and Revelations, the Muslim call to prayer, the poetry of Dryden, Swift, Kipling and Tennyson, a Horace ode, the ancient Mahabharata, impressions of a victim of the Hiroshima bomb, and even Sir Lancelot. This work is powerful, an emotional roller-coaster, but it ends upliftingly in hope.
The Armed Man: a Mass for Peace is on Sunday afternoon, April 27th, 2:30 pm at St. Paul’s church, downtown Charlottetown (Grafton @ ChurchSt.)
Admission: $20 online at IslandChoralSociety.ca … or cash at the door.
Information: [email protected]; 902-628-6778
Event Venue
St. Paul's church, downtown Charlottetown (Grafton @ Church), 21 Church St, Charlottetown, PE C1A, Canada,Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
