‘II don’t see any point in being a composer if you don’t communicate,” composer Karl Jenkins said in a Church Times interview. He certainly practises what he preaches, to judge by the Oxford University Press Choir’s performance of his work The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace.

The score was commissioned ten years ago, to mark the passing of “the most war-torn and destructive century in human history”. It intermixes sections of the Mass with texts ranging from Malory and Dryden to Togi Sankichi, who survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, only to die later from radiation exposure. By horrible irony, the first recording of the work was released the day after the 9/11 attacks.

Jenkins’s easily accessible music no doubt elicits sneers from the snootier members of the musical establishment — after all, he has written jingles for TV adverts, and is more often heard on Classic FM than on Radio 3.

The Armed Man evokes everything from swooping film scores in sections like Hymn before Action and Now the Guns have Stopped to Fauré to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana — but Jenkins outdoes Orff in his masterful use of rhythms, particularly the insistent beat of the march. He also loves to spring surprises — the sudden introduction of organ pedals and matching double bass in the opening section for instance, and the words “the animals scattered in all directions screaming terrible screams” sung very quietly, not at the expected full belt.

Conductor Malcolm Pearce, strong mezzo soloist Shira Lang, the Oxford Sinfonia (excellent throughout), and the OUP Choir embraced all this with much enthusiasm — like Howard Goodall and John Rutter, Jenkins plainly tailors his music to communicate with performers as well as audiences. The trumpet introduction to the mesmerizing Charge! sequence visibly energized the choir before its first entry.

Earlier, Purcell’s Te Deum, Pavane, and Jubilate received workmanlike performances. But it was Jenkins who made the evening.