Confession time: I have a near obsession with Requiems. Browsing through the shelves, any CD with the word “Requiem” on it instantly finds its way into my shopping basket. For such self-confessed Requiemophiles, Cyprès Records’ series “A History of the Requiem” should be compulsive listening. Warning bells jangle, however, when one realises this entire series is confined to just four CDs covering the half-a-millennium between Ockeghem and Pierre Bartholomée; allowing a little less than 40 minutes per century. More warning bells jangle with the choice of music. The series began logically enough with the earliest surviving Requiem but then veered strangely off course with Campra and Michael Haydn which, with the best will in the world, could hardly be said to be the most significant to come out of the 17th and 18th centuries.

As representatives of the 19th and 20th centuries perhaps Bruckner and Duruflé are not the most obvious choices, but as they perhaps are less well represented on disc than some others, Guy Janssens may well have felt his Laudantes Consort was better placed to make an impact. He was mistaken. From the outset of the Bruckner we are obviously in a territory where sour intonation between orchestra and voices is going to disrupt the even tenor of the performance; and so it does quite nastily in a very lacklustre “Dies irae”.

In electing to give us the “church” version of the Duruflé, with organ only, we are spared the tuning problems and, as an added bonus, have Benoît Mernier’s splendidly registered accompaniments. We also have some pleasingly tranquil and relaxed choral singing, the choir clearly far more at ease here than in the Bruckner. But it all fights against Janssens’s uninspiring direction, the opening movement sounding for all the world as if the grave is being dug in thick, waterlogged clay, and with a listless “In Paradisum” rounding things off, it seems that the soul is unable even to raise the effort to make its ultimate way heavenward.