Lux Stellarum (“Light of the Stars’) is a short requiem. The CD plays for less than 30 minutes, but much is packed into that duration and one does not feel shortchanged. Each of the five ‘standard’ movements (Requiem aeternam, Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and In Paradisum) include additional Biblical and liturgical texts. An extra movement (number 3 in the sequence) sets a poem by the Canadian Marjorie Pickthall that contemplates the stars which sang when earth was made, and parallels a later insertion into the Agnus Dei of John Donne’s ‘one equal music… one equal eternity’ prayer. Outside such times of repose, there is much drama, such as in the Sanctus that builds to a huge climax and also, at the end of the In Paradisum, a final organ outburst to conclude the whole work.

The music is eclectic in a variety of styles and textures, and includes plainsong from the Requiem Mass and also appropriately Conditor alme siderum (‘Creator of the stars of night) in a way that reminds one of Duruflé, also an influence along with other 20th-century church composers. It is not so much a liturgical Requiem as a devotional work that incorporates the Requiem text into a contemplation on the mystery of the cosmos. Rupert Gough, his excellent student choir, and Andrew Dewar’s mastery of the Tickell/Ruffatti organ in the acoustic of Keble College Chapel are all captured in a first-class recording.