Premiered at the opening ceremony of Warsaw’s Temple of Divine Providence, The Covenant was commissioned from one of Poland’s most celebrated film and television composers to mark the fulfilment of a vow made in 1791 – to build a temple as gratitude to a God who had ‘delivered Poland from foreign aggression and internal chaos’. Wars, invasions and partitions intervened, and it wasn’t until 2016 that the building was finally completed.

Performed here by the London Symphony Orchestra and Warsaw’s Cappella Corale Varsaviana Choir under conductor Lee Reynolds, this multi-movement work is very much an occasion piece, offering a sequence of atmospheric episodes that seem designed to function as soundtracks to meditation or procession. The first, and substantially the longest, is a hymn to the Virgin. A single male voice (Robert Pożarski) chants the lulling, repeating litanies to Mary, while in impossibly delicate increments the instruments of the LSO and a wordless chorus fill out the texture beneath the hymn. As a musical metaphor for the temple’s long construction it’s potent.

The shorter subsequent movements combine this chanted element (Hymn) with filmic passages for strings (Lamentations) and a throbbing great Ave Maria, sung by Katarzyna Lakowska. All remains firmly within the familiar idiom of the contemporary film score, but Krzysztof Aleksander Janczak’s orchestrations bring plenty of textural variety and subtlety, most strikingly the use of two solo ney flutes that add their grainy, evocative voices to the orchestra in ‘The Temple’.

Will The Covenant have a concert life? It’s hard to imagine. But as a musical testament to 200 years of toil and faith it’s a work of scope and stature.