Pascoe: Secular Requiem – Truro Cathedral Choir

Cornwall does not produce composers the way Vienna once did, by the gross, but it has given us Russell Pascoe, and on the evidence of this disc that is no small thing.

A requiem without doctrine is a peculiar animal. Brahms managed one, choosing his own texts from Luther’s Bible and steering pointedly clear of the liturgy’s promise of judgment. Pascoe’s Secular Requiem belongs to that lineage — Britten’s War Requiem is another obvious ancestor, though Pascoe’s is a gentler, less accusatory piece than either of those models. What strikes you first is the sheer confidence of the architecture. Working from a libretto assembled by Anthony Pinching — a clinical immunologist by trade, extraordinarily, not a literary don — Pascoe has built five movements that trace something like a secular Kübler-Ross arc, though he’d probably wince at my saying so. “The Proposition.” “The Recognition.” “The Reaction.” “The Transition.” “The Accommodation.” Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — you can hear the shadow-structure without Pascoe ever underlining it, which is a mark of tact.

The Tagore refrain is the emotional spine of the whole enterprise: “Peace, my heart, let the time for parting be sweet.” Set for unaccompanied upper voices, it returns after the first three sections like a held breath, and the Truro trebles — this is, after all, their own cathedral, their own resonance, their own stone — sing it with an unforced purity that no amount of studio polish could manufacture. By the time the refrain reappears after the fourth section, thickened and darkened in scoring, the effect is almost unbearably poignant. I don’t use that word carelessly.

Pinching’s text-selection is genuinely inspired — Donne rubbing shoulders with Dylan Thomas, with Stephen Anderton woven in at Pascoe’s own insistence. That the composer fought to keep certain poets in tells you something about how personally he holds this material. This is not abstract requiem-writing. There’s grief here that has a name, evidently, even if the program notes are (rightly) discreet about whose.

Catherine Wyn-Rogers brings decades of experience in exactly this repertoire — her Angel in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius is a benchmark release, and you can hear that lineage in the way she shapes long lines without ever forcing tone. The voice has weathered a bit, understandably, but the intelligence of the phrasing more than compensates. Julien Van Mellaerts, a New Zealand baritone with a career still very much on the rise, sings with an ardor that occasionally outpaces his diction — a few consonants get lost in the cathedral’s generous acoustic — but the sound itself is burnished, alive, never merely dutiful.

Christopher Gray, who directs both choir and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales here, clearly believes in this score down to the marrow, and it shows in pacing that never rushes the more static passages nor drags the climaxes. The orchestral writing is not especially adventurous — Pascoe’s harmonic language sits comfortably within a tonal-modal idiom that owes something to Howells, something to Finzi, perhaps a touch of Jonathan Dove in the choral textures — but it is unfailingly well-made, and it knows exactly what emotional work each chord needs to do.

The two shorter works are welcome context rather than filler. Threnody for Jowan (“Every leaf must fall”), dating from 1995, is spare almost to the point of austerity — a private grief given the plainest possible music, and more affecting for that plainness. A Sequence for Remembrance, composed decades later in 2018, feels like a distillation of everything Pascoe had learned about writing for voices in a resonant space by then; it’s the shortest piece on the disc and arguably the most quietly perfect.

Should this displace Fauré or Duruflé on your shelf? Of course not — nothing here aims at that kind of universality, nor claims to. But as an entirely personal, thoroughly considered response to loss — one written by “a well-informed and carefully reasoned non-believer,” to borrow Gray’s own nice phrase — the Secular Requiem earns its place. Regent’s engineers have caught the cathedral acoustic without letting it swallow inner detail, no mean feat given how live that building can be. I came to this disc not expecting much beyond competent regional music-making. I left it moved, and slightly astonished that I hadn’t encountered Pascoe’s work sooner.