Rebecca Dale’s debut album arrives with much fanfare and publicity, with her new label proclaiming that she is ‘the first female composer to sign to Decca Classics’. (Decca, where have you been?) In the face of such assertive public promotion, it is perhaps somewhat ironic that the main work on display here is, in the composer’s own words, ‘a very personal piece’. Dale’s mother died in 2010. Writing the Materna Requiem thus served a cathartic function. The work was also a way for Dale to build a bridge back to her mother.

Couched in a highly accessible language, Materna Requiem is likely to build further bridges for the composer, especially among Classic FM listeners. One need look no further than the Requiem’s main theme. Heard for the first time a minute or so into the Introit, a slowly rising modally inflected melody moves against a steadily falling line in the bass. The theme reappears throughout the work, functioning as yet another musical bridge. Echoes of the consonant choral style of Eric Whitacre, Paul Mealor and Patrick Hawes are never far away, often appearing alongside rhythmic bursts of energy and colourful splashes of sound one associates with the film soundtracks of John Williams and Howard Shore.

Perhaps Dale’s masterstroke is that she manages to blend these two elements. Unsurprisingly for a composer whose main commissions up until now have been for film and TV, there’s a strong visual quality to the music throughout, also heard in the other work on this disc, the more overtly programmatic When Music Sounds. If Verdi’s Requiem is operatic in its visual power, Dale’s is predominantly filmic. It might be going a step too far to describe the Materna Requiem as a soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist; but whether it will stand the test of time, as Verdi’s Requiem has done, remains to be seen.