Karl Jenkins: The Armed Man - Anniversary Edition (includes 'For the Fallen') [CD+DVD]

I have been playing the original CD for 10 years and have always loved it, but now it has been made even better by the addition of film footage on DVD. Appropriately released just before Remembrance Day, the film provides a visual background to the wonderful music - each movement having appropriately selected footage - marching soldiers, different religions at prayer, injured and dying soldiers, death, footage of Hiroshima and 9/11. The background film is not for the faint-hearted, but provides a poignant and very moving reminder of the futility of war - and the joy at its ending.

The tracks have been digitally remastered but musically I do not notice any real difference between this CD and the original - except maybe a touch crisper. My only - very small - criticism is that the beautiful new track, For the Fallen, is not on the DVD which is somewhat irritating. I am a little unsure as to why I need both a CD and a DVD apart from that!

Now what am I going to do with my original CD?

Karl Jenkins' `The Armed Man' is apparently the most-performed piece by any living classical composer, so the chances are you'll have heard at least snippets of it sometime, somewhere. On this Special Edition CD/DVD set, you get two performances: the CD features the London Philharmonic and the National Youth Choir; while the DVD features a live performance at Cardiff's St. David's Hall (originally broadcast on S4C) with the Orchestra of the Welsh National Opera. Although TV broadcasts of classical performances don't always `work' that well, this one's anything but dull. It features, on a giant screen behind the performers, newsreel and TV footage of images from the buildup to war (marching Hitler Youth and Soviet Mayday parades, for example) and from the aftermath. Some excellent editing from S4C means the cameras focus on the screen with sometimes mesmerising effect at key dramatic points during the recital.

In fact, the video backdrop to the DVD performance is very much a key to the work itself: follow it, and your understanding of what Jenkins is trying to do with the music and diverse accompanying texts will be enhanced. Images of the Twin Towers burning play at the mid-point of the work, acting as a powerful still `centre' and a watershed as the work moves from the menacing tones of the build-up to its quieter, more reflective aftermath; and we cut to a view of the earth from space at the instant in the Benedictus when the choir's first `Hosanna in excelsis' rings out.

In the accompanying booklet, Jenkins describes how critics have labelled him `emotionally manipulative'. There's no doubt that the music, with its jazz-inspired rhythmic percussion pulse, combines with a powerful score (including extracts from Dryden's St Ceciia's Day and Togi Sankichi's poem written in the aftermath of Hiroshima) to achieve an effect on the listener of great and moving intensity. And Jenkins builds in a very accomplished and innovative way on the given structures (Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and Benedictus) of the `Armed Man' masses of the 15th and 16th centuries. Dedicated as the work is to the victims of Kosovo, and featuring both an Islamic adhan (call to prayer) and text from Mahabharata, there's no doubting the composer's desire to produce something that would speak to the universal desire for peace - for `better is peace than always war', as the closing piece of the Mass has it.

But while his intentions are clear, my only slight concern with this otherwise strikingly beautiful work is whether Jenkins' striving for emotional effect is sometimes at the expense of a more unflinching look at the political and social causes of war. But Britten's War Requiem this isn't, and if the music doesn't pose too many difficult questions, the images on the video screen, repellent, horrific, pitiful as they sometimes are, should give pause for thought. So, a Special Edition worth shelling out for: and you'll get an exclusive new Jenkins track `For the Fallen', which sets Laurence Binyon's famous Remembrance poem to music in memory of the composer's bomber pilot uncle, lost over Berlin in 1944.

This is a pot pourri of music linked loosely by an excellent Kyrie, Sanctus and Benedictus. It was worth having for that alone. the rest is largely in fill. But then who am i in music terms other than a deaf pop critic.