The composer mistaken for Meghan Markle: ‘I was bemused’

When Karl Jenkins took his seat at King Charles III’s coronation, little did he know he would end up going viral on social media. Sitting in Westminster Abbey, next to Andrew Lloyd Webber, he sported his trademark shaggy mullet, handlebar moustache and tinted glasses. Must be the Duchess of Sussex in disguise was the outlandish, amused conclusion drawn by the internet. Unlikely as it seems, the story grew so big that the composer ended up clarifying his identity on TikTok, and reporters from around the world clamoured to speak to him.
“People say I handled it quite well. I wasn’t angered by it. I was bemused,” he gamely tells me over coffee in central London (not in disguise, I can confirm). “Other people said I was there to steal the crown jewels.”
In reality, Jenkins had been invited because his harp piece Tros y Garreg (Crossing the stone), commissioned by the King when he was Prince of Wales, was being played before the service. Jenkins still seems baffled by what happened, not least as he had met Meghan on a couple of occasions. “She was very gracious and pleasant,” he says.
More surprises were in store for Jenkins this year. He owes his career, he says, to Classic FM (he’s long been championed by the commercial radio station) and the promoter Raymond Gubbay (whose Karl Jenkins tours frequently sell out). He’s the most performed living composer, it’s often claimed, while his oratorio The Armed Man has been performed more than 3,000 times. Yet despite its popularity, Jenkins’s music has never been heard at the BBC Proms — and it didn’t look to be on the cards. But this summer the 80-year-old British composer will tick off that first when his new saxophone concerto, Stravaganza, is performed at the Royal Albert Hall.
“It’s strange that it’s come at this stage, having done it for thirty years. Now, somehow I’ve got the call,” he says. How does it feel? “Strange, unexpected, interesting, happy.” Arguably, it’s overdue. “Some people made efforts along the way, but I think the situation has changed with a change of controller,” he says. A shrewd guess may be that the controller of Radio 3 and the Proms, Sam Jackson, previously the boss at Classic FM, has smoothed Jenkins’s welcome into the BBC fold. “I know him quite well, but he still has standards,” Jenkins counters, in his typically dry manner. “He’s not going to put on any old rubbish.”
Stravaganza is a showcase for the virtuoso Jess Gillam, who first picked up the saxophone as a child at a community carnival centre in Cumbria having failed to master the stilts. Inspired by Gillam’s background, Jenkins has composed a tonal concerto blending a classical sound with the freedom of jazz improvisation and the rhythms of Brazilian samba. A trademark Jenkins fusion of cultural and musical traditions, in other words. I quote Gillam’s description of it to him: “It has beautiful moments, elements of eccentricity, a lot of humour and almost sarcastic conversations between saxophone and orchestra.” Jenkins interjects: “And it’s very good.”
Audiences can judge for themselves at the Prom and on his latest recording for Decca, with whom he has signed a lifetime deal. The album also includes a blast from the past: a symphonic reworking of his string piece Palladio, which was written for a De Beers diamond ring advert when Jenkins worked in TV advertising in the 1980s and 1990s, composing for Levi’s, Renault, British Airways and the like. He had moved into the industry after training as a classical musician and a successful stint as a jazz player with the bands Nucleus and Soft Machine.
A Delta Air Lines commission, directed by Hugh Hudson of Chariots of Fire fame, gave Jenkins, by then in his fifties, his big break in 1995. His uplifting track Adiemus fused classical, world and New Age influences with multi-tracked sopranos singing a language of his own invention. “I didn’t have time to find texts of any kind. That’s where the invented language came up,” he explains with a grin. “It was an odd reason to do it, but the clock was ticking and it had to be done. I thought of scat singers in jazz, but a bit more organised.”
“It had a big impact,” he adds. That’s an understatement. Adiemus became the opener for his album Songs of Sanctuary, which has gone on to sell three million copies. “Suddenly record sales were shooting up in all kinds of places internationally,” he says. Enough for him to think of retiring? “Yeah, well not really. It wasn’t like pop,” he says, refusing to be drawn on the numbers.
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His popularity surged, but the critics had strong opinions. Yes, his music was popular, but was it any good? “I’ve never dumbed down. My problem, in terms of respect and acceptance, was that I never really liked atonal and serial music,” he says, when we talk about snobbery in the arts. “It’s quite easy to write a complicated piece that’s a big mathematical puzzle, but Bach could do all that and still go to the soul immediately, not just to the head.”
Jenkins is on hiatus, taking a rest from composing, though he’s mulling over a BBC commission for next year. (“I never know if I’m meant to mention it,” he says.) Looking over his career, he wishes he had written an opera or musical, or something like Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, which sits between genres. But when it comes to contemplating his musical legacy, he’s self-deprecating. “No, no. I don’t think it’ll last long after I’ve gone,” he says. “I don’t know, though, other people tell me it’ll go on for ever.”
The album Stravaganza is out on August 9. Stravaganza is at the BBC Proms on August 12