An opening Sinfonia con fuga sets off promisingly with sinister, brooding suspensions, sounding a little as if the first phrases of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater are murmuring from the tomb.
Alas, before too long, the mood is dissipated by flaccid sequencing that even Vivaldi would disown.
Impassioned playing, under conductor Roman Valek, with spirited harpsichord continuo from Barbara Maria Willi, does not distract from the predictability of the music.
Richter's setting of Psalm 129, De profundis clamavi, was popular in its time, serving at not one, but two funerals in 1779.
This is an emotionally charged text for us in 2015, going beyond its many musical realisations to literary cris de coeur from writers such as Oscar Wilde and Garcia Lorca.
Richter creates little emotional resonance here.
The words, "From the morning watch even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord", are treated in a style best described as journeyman jaunty, not helped by a bass soloist who is uncomfortable in his lower range.
Best ignore what are probably apocryphal tales of the dying Richter hurrying to finish his Requiem so it could be played at his own funeral.
This work is the major offering on the disc and has moments of rough-hewn power.
Yet Richter's fatal attraction to the decorative undercuts the Dies Irae with rather too many Rococo flourishes, even if the Supraphon engineers manage to score their own dramatic coup when the two women soloists are startlingly foregrounded after the roar of the Confutatis.
Such a coup, however, does not atone for the tired sequences of the following Huic ergo pace Deus, reminding one of problems already encountered.
