It’s that time of year when I take my pop CDs out of the car and replace them with a little choral music. Coldplay goes into cold storage and Elbow gets elbowed out.

The college choir is shortly heading up to Chester Cathedral for the annual universities choral shindig, and any hint of what the piece of music we’re singing is supposed to sound like is welcome.

This year it’s Faure’s Requiem. It’s nearly always a requiem, come to think about it. Next year, when they hold the festival in Birmingham, it’s Brahms’ Requiem. With a combined chorus of some 300 – we’re a minor fragment of that – you need something writ large.

The requiem represents the biggest challenge for any choir, and for any choral composer, the touchstone of his claim to posterity. Much as the symphony is the chief mountain to climb for the orchestral writer.

Like the symphony, the requiem was the concept album of its day – slow bits, fast bits, and the chance to round up all the earlier tunes in the grand finale.

Lyrically the requiem might be stuck fast in the Latin of the pre-Reformation Catholic mass, but its appeal never appears to wane.

Given that any musician feels the pressure of his or her predecessors breathing down their neck, even the contemporary composers – John Rutter, Howard Goodall, Andrew Lloyd Webber – have all felt duty-bound to have a crack at the genre.