One of the most performed living composers, Sir Karl Jenkins is this year celebrating his 80th birthday. He talks about losing his mother at a young age, performing at the Coronation and why he doesn't listen to critics
MY MOTHER DIED WHEN I WAS JUST FOUR YEARS OLD.
She was in her mid-thirties and had tuberculosis, and I was too young to really grasp what had happened. We lived in Penclawdd in Wales and I was sent to stay with my mother's sister and her husband in a nearby village. Still, it was a happy childhood. My father and I eventually moved in with my grandmother and another widowed aunt. It was a big family with lots of love from many ladies—aunts and cousins—but there was always something that felt like it was missing because my mother wasn't there.
MY FATHER INTRODUCED ME TO MUSIC. He was a music teacher, a chapel organist and a choirmaster. I started having piano lessons when I was five or six years of age and I became fairly proficient but not brilliant. I was also exposed to a lot of music at that time because it was the beginning of LP vinyl records, just after the war. My father built up a huge collection of classical albums and music he loved—from Bach through to the usual suspects like Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Mahler, Brahms, Richard Strauss and Wagner.
AFTER THE PIANO I TURNED TO THE RECORDER, which I was also quite proficient on. When I went to Gowerton Grammar school I started on the oboe, which is very similar to the recorder so it was quite an easy changeover really, and later on I played the saxophone. I was in the National Youth Orchestra of Wales and we did a concert tour, so to some extent I was a musical tourist. I didn't really know what I wanted to become or what I wanted to do but the important thing during my teenage years was that I kind of rebelled against what passed as modern classical music—some of which was great but a lot of which was a cacophony in some people's minds. So, as a music student at Cardiff University I had this dichotomy going on.
THEN I DISCOVERED JAZZ MUSIC, which immediately grabbed me because it was of its time, it was modern, yet it was still tonal. It was still accessible and it still worked within the pattern of keys rather than being hugely dissonant. It was also very exciting rhythmically and the improvisatory nature of it appealed to me. So I had this kind of dual existence, moonlighting as a jazz musician in what used to be the Tiger Bay area of Cardiff at night while doing my studies at university during the day
