There are a lot of firsts here in a album that blazes a trail on multiple levels. This is the first commercial recording both for the Choirs of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and their rising-star music director Anna Lapwood. It’s also an album dominated by female composers – still very much the exception or token addition on Oxbridge choral releases.

Lapwood arrived at Pembroke in 2016 and founded the Girls’ Choir (for singers aged from 11 to 18) two years later, so this recording represents the first fruits of a still-new partnership. And they’re already impressive. The choirs both share a fresh, ingenuous delivery and obvious enthusiasm for the programme. Only once – in John Tavener’s Mother of God – does that spill out over the musical lines, creating small bulges of excitement. Otherwise there’s real control evident in the blend (built upwards from some impressive low basses) and tuning, whose precision brings simple works such as Matthew Martin’s Iustorum animae and Elizabeth Poston’s The Water of Tyne into glowing focus.

Kerry Andrew’s arrangement of All things are quite silent is a striking opener – whistling wind, raindrops and seabird calls swelling around the folk melody as the narrator’s lover sails further and further away – and Imogen Holst’s Agnus Dei dangles the tantalising promise of a complete account of the Mass in A minor from which it comes. Rebecca Clarke’s neoclassical Ave Maria is another attractive discovery, as is Lapwood’s own O nata lux, which captures both the mystery and the awesome magnitude of the Incarnation with great economy of forces. Some classy schmaltz is supplied by Rheinberger’s Abendlied and Kerensa Briggs’s Media vita, but I struggle to share the choir’s enthusiasm for Eleanor Daley’s rather vapid anthems.

There’s a lot of music here, but all of it occupies a similar sound world – radiant, haloed, slow. You can see why: it showcases the choir brilliantly and smuggles a lot of contemporary music on to a recording with real mainstream appeal. Ultimately this debut disc feels like a selection of delicious canapés – musical mouthfuls that tease more substantial things to come.