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The composer Karl Jenkins is the bane of many music critics’ lives. They cannot understand him; or why he is so popular with serious music lovers. A recent study shows that he is now the most performed living composer in the world. If Jenkins was a Mick Jagger or a Paul McCartney then, some critics argue, different criteria would apply. But this man takes the most solemn themes, such as the Mass, and more recently Stabat Mater (the intensely moving 13th century hymn to Mary as she stands at the foot of the Cross), and presents them in an astonishing, and exciting, new format that makes you sit up, and ask: “What was that?” It is certainly not in the classical tradition.

ON THURSDAY June 11 at 8pm, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and the Galway Baroque Singers will perform their annual concert in Leisureland.

There can only be two reasons why music highbrows are still a bit ‘iffy’ about the Welsh composer Karl Jenkins. One is probably a comment on his unusual route into classical music. A talented music scholar from Cardiff University and the Royal Academy London, he founded a jazz group Nucleus, which won first prize in the Montreux Jazz Festival. Then to keep bread on the table, he made a series of TV advertising jingles. One of them, called ‘got off the ground’, was for an airline. But it became so popular and catchy, that people were clogging the airline’s phones demanding what was that amazing music. Jenkins developed the theme and, extending its African and Arabic sounds, it became the energetic Adiemus. It topped the pop charts across the world.