Last weekend my wife and I were lucky enough to be given a pair of tickets to see Karl Jenkins' masterpiece The Armed Man performed at the Royal Festival Hall and conducted by the man himself. The mass was commissioned by the Royal Armouries in 2000 to mark the end of a violent millennium and create a legacy of peace and hope for the future. Poignantly it was destined to be released on the 12th of September 2001, which turned out to be a day when we all needed peace and hope like never before.
Usually when I listen to classical music I tend to enjoy it from the wood up, I marvel at the depth, richness and complexity of sounds that a really beautiful instrument produces (hearing a Stradivarus live is a very special way to spend an evening). I like to consider the time and pride that went into preparing the very best timber, the luthiers experience and judgment in selecting it and then shaping the components with a degree of skill and perfectionism that few can match, instrument making really is precision work at its absolute finest.
Add to that the innumerable hours of practice that each person in the orchestra has invested to master their instrument and learn to play it as a part of a perfectly orchestrated team. Then you need a genius, a one off in each generation who has the imagination, vision and intellectual capacity to bring all of this endavour to bear and you have the essance of mankind distilled into a sucession of fleeting sounds that can make you smile, or cry, or fall in love with the flick of a baton.
Our huge thanks to our friends Mark and Donna for letting us have the tickets (they were really good seats too).
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