Commissioned by the New York downtown composers’ collective Bang on a Can for their People’s Commissioning Fund Concert in 2000, this accessible piece was actually premièred at the Festival of New Spiritual Music at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw in November 1999. Despite drawing on certain historic techniques, the Chysalid Requiem strikes me as a Modernist rather than post-Modernist piece, in that its numerous allusions to the back-catalogue of choral styles, from the opening plainchant of the ‘Introit’ onwards, come across as natural developments and extensions of the tradition, rather than operating as a nudgingly knowing scavenging tour through it.

Twining is an advocate of just intonation, and in the Requiem he also makes extensive use of tricky techniques like Tuvan throat-singing. There are some quite complex structural processes going on, based on mathematical ratios within and between sections, but these do not obtrude: Twining properly pays as much attention to the surface sounds as to the underpinnings of his construction. Textures are predominantly bright, with overtone singing imparting an effectively unearthly atmosphere to several sections. The technique is usually used in the upper registers, but is also employed dramatically in the lower voices for the ‘Dies irae’, where Twining resists the customary violence, instead creating tension and dread out of the strangeness of the vocal sounds.

The small, custom-built choir (12 singers, several of whom ‘double’ in different vocal ranges) deliver the transparent and uncluttered lines and textures with clarity throughout, and never more effectively than in the ethereally brittle ‘In Paradisum’.