AS PART of Calne Music and Art’s Festival, Calne Choral delighted a capacity audience at St Mary’s School on Saturday evening. The composer, Sir Karl Jenkins CBE, well known for The Armed Man - a Mass for Peace, has fused Western and Eastern cultures into his Requiem, with the introduction of Japanese haiku ‘death’ poems.

The five Japanese haikus were beautifully and competently sung, in Japanese, by St Mary’s Junior Consort under their director Bethan Fryar. These haiku intersperse the usual Latin requiem movements, and the hip hop rhythm which appears in the Dies Irae was later used as the soundtrack for a Lynx television commercial.

In the 1980s Jenkins composed music for advertisements, the most well known being the Papa? Nicole? advert for the Renault Clio.

The traditional orchestra was joined by Richard Stagg, a professional flute player, playing the shakuhachi – a traditional Japanese style of flute, made from the base of a bamboo shoot. Richard, after 33 years with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, has been studying the shakuhachi with Yoshikazu Iwamoto, who taught at Dartington and later at York and Durham universities and lives in the UK.

Jenkin’s latest choral work, Cantata Memoria – for the children, marks the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster and features the renowned Bryn Terfel and Catrin Finch, who both performed in the Marden House Concert Series in Calne some years ago.

Carole Browne