Substituting understated transcendency for fire and brimstone drama (the Dies Irae conspicuously absent), Matthew Coleridge’s beautiful Requiem receives lyrical advocacy from the Choir of Royal Holloway. It’s Ockeghem out of Vaughan Williams: Rupert Gough sculpts glowing vocal harmonies to emphasise the work’s stress on light rather than darkness, with the Southern Sinfonia’s cossetting strings providing a solid bedrock and Maxim Calver’s lugubrious cello movingly personifying the departing soul. Similar landscapes of the heart are found in seven accompanying pieces, not least the sparse textures and dreamlike reverie of And I Saw a New Heaven, a Magnificat in which jubilant folk-like melodies give way to meditative choral polyphony, and a Gloria underpinned by a majestic organ toccata.

– Note: this review was also published in Cathedral Music Magazine