Karl Jenkins: One World - Choral Score
One World deals with a fractured world (populist governments, plagues, climate change, human trafficking, disrespect for basic human rights, terrorism, war) and heralds a vision of a peaceful and egalitarian planet. The work is best encapsulated by one of the texts set: ‘Tikkun Olam’, Hebrew for ‘repair the world’, a Jewish concept of stewardship over God’s creation.
The music is scored in Jenkins’s inimitable style familiar from such works as Adiemus: Songs of Sanctuary, The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, Requiem and The Peacemakers. To create his global vision for One World, he takes inspiration from texts as diverse as the Bible, the Hindu Gayatri Mantra, the poetry of the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, African American abolitionist and suffragist poet Frances Harper (c.1850) and Lebanese American writer, poet and artist Kahlil Gibran. As in many of Jenkins’s works, Carol Barratt contributes some impactful text (including for the movement Paradise Lost?), as well as various adaptations.