As its title suggests, John Joubert's new choral work, the most substantial premiere at this year's Three Choirs festival, is unapologetically modelled on Brahms's German Requiem. It is similarly scored for soprano and baritone soloists, together with boys' and adult choirs and a large orchestra, and more significantly Joubert's English equivalent is also a meditation on death, rather than a setting of the requiem liturgy. The six movements are based on a collection of texts, ranging from couplets to extended passages, taken from both the Old and New Testaments with extracts of psalms predominating, all in modern English translations.
The emotional trajectory of the 45-minute work is mapped in the titles given to each of the movements – from the bleak Intimations of the opening to the Solace that the finale eventually finds, very much a progress from darkness to light. But Joubert's music, with its well-judged use of dissonance within a tonal context, seems much more striking when anguished and despairing than in the rather bland diatonic choral writing of the final two movements.
The two solo movements pair the singers with specific instrumental colours. Neal Davies's impassioned account of the baritone's prayer in the second movement was underpinned by a solo horn; soprano Carolyn Sampson's expression of hope in the fourth was accompanied by an oboe. When the soloists join the choirs for the final movement, they bring with them those instrumental colours, together with fragments of the texts they have sung. In general, though, the words were hard to decipher in the cathedral acoustic, but the sound, from the festival chorus and the Philharmonia under Adrian Partington, was appropriately rich and affirmative.
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