Click here to watch Karl Jenkins conduct his choral spectacular Adiemus

Philip Clark: It's all about money

He shifts CDs in unreal quantities and has audiences weeping in the aisles at the Albert Hall. He was hailed by no less a figure than Kiri Te Kanawa as a “gentle and quiet genius”. So, as Karl Jenkins prepares to unveil his Stabat Mater in Liverpool, how could anyone be cynical? After all, nothing could be more benign than a composer reaching out with compositions rooted in the grand tradition of British choral music. But dig deeper and the sinister underbelly of what has been coined “the Jenkins phenomenon” becomes apparent - he's at the epicentre of a ruthlessly engineered corporate campaign.

The perfect example is The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, dedicated to those who lost their lives in the Kosovo War. Does Jenkins really think that his clubbable tunes and saccharine harmonies are an appropriate response to one of the bloodiest and most complex wars in recent history? Jenkins transforms Kosovo's horrors into something safe for weeping at in the concert hall because it's pitched at the level of soap opera. And the distasteful inference is: criticise Jenkins and you're effectively disrespecting the memories of those who perished. It shamelessly shields its dearth of content behind an emotive façade.

When a composer commenting on war begins his Mass for Peace with a crude evocation of a marching army and pounding military drums, you know you're not dealing with a subtle mind. When that same composer, in his 2005 Requiem, attempts to fuse the Latin Mass with Japanese haiku by deploying caricatures of indigenous Japanese folk music, you're left wondering how he can get away with music that's so lacking in critical judgment.

John Cage, in one of his many mischievous aphorisms, declared: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it.” One interpretation could be that the horrors of our era are so profound that music is powerless to comment directly upon it. Cage's solution was to liberate sound in the idealistic hope that people's minds might be elevated above conditioning by society.

If Cage was about the liberation of thought, then Jenkins is about the mass manipulation of emotions. Another of Cage's maxims declared that he wanted to be moved by music but objected to being pushed; every gesture in a Jenkins score, conversely, puts inverted commas around emotion and turns musical expression into a theatrical spectacle. This is a totalitarian mode of expression, feeding off a carefully cultivated cult of personality.

What licenses Jenkins is, of course, the hard-nosed PR that spins away in the background. Both Jenkins's publisher (Boosey & Hawkes) and his record label (EMI Classics) have been hit hard as the once lucrative classical music industry has fragmented around them. They see in Jenkins an opportunity to break even and assert a new orthodoxy that cannily sidesteps the awkward issues about where modern composition has reached. Jenkins holds up a mirror to the pitiful cultural aspirations of our times. His music is not about surprise - it's about the sound of ker-ching.

Philip Clark is a composer and contributor to Wire and Gramophone

Darrent Henley: It's life-affirming music

It has always seemed to me that many of those people who control access to contemporary classical music in Britain today appear to subscribe to a “no pain, no gain” notion when it comes to serving up their fare. They regard those of us outside their club with a mixture of contempt and pity.

Commercial success is, of course, the biggest crime of all for the members of this club. Any classical composer whose CDs are stocked in supermarkets, where they sell by the trolley-load, is marked out as a particular threat in a world where many commissions never make it as far as being committed to disc and struggle to gain any further performance after their premiere.

Set against this context, Karl Jenkins should be public enemy No 1 for the self-appointed classical- music elite. He has consistently been the most popular living composer in the Classic FM Hall of Fame, the annual poll of our listeners' music tastes.

He has achieved sales figures of which most classical composers can only dream. The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, which had its premiere in 2000, has now sold 152,000 copies on CD in the UK alone. His publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, has sold more than 53,000 copies of the work's vocal score. Performances since its premiere now stand at 537 worldwide. Of the 348 performances in the UK, the vast majority come from amateur choirs rather than from professional (and publicly subsidised) organisations.

Jenkins is no one-hit wonder either. His Requiem has been performed 169 times in the three years since its premiere and his publisher reports a growing clamour for scores to his Stabat Mater, even before its sell-out debut performance in Liverpool next week.

The foundations for Jenkins's success were set in place during his time as an oboe player in the National Youth Orchestra and in his studies at the Royal Academy of Music, where the rigorous disciplines of classical composition were instilled in him. His early career as a jazz musician and as a member of the 1970s rock outfit Soft Machine gave him a completely different perspective, teaching him how to create music that had the primary objective of being entertaining. Then, as the composer of music for television advertising, he honed this amalgam of discipline and entertainment to create his own unique sound.

To my ear, Jenkins is a great modern composer with a good old-fashioned tune inside him. Not for him the painful, unrewarding squeaky-gate music of many of his contemporaries. Instead, he writes wonderful life-affirming music, packed to the brim with memorable melodies. Jenkins is an unselfish composer who has a precise understanding of his audience and what they want. He writes music with the listener in mind rather than simply composing for himself.

His success as the people's classical composer is all down to his unerring ability to deliver intense aural pleasure without the excruciating pain.

Darren Henley is MD of Classic FM

Karl Jenkins's Stabat Mater has its world premiere at Liverpool Anglican Cathedral on March 15 (0151-709 3789), broadcast on Classic FM on March 26

Do you agree with Philip Clark or Darren Henley? Tell us what you think below

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010