If Bruno Maderna’s modernist page-turners – works such as Quadrivium, Biogramma and his Piano Concerto – is the Maderna that matters to you, the Requiem he composed in 1946, aged 26, might leave you feeling short-changed. Still, mustn’t grumble. This historically weighty slab of juvenilia, considered by Maderna himself to have been a personal turning point, had been presumed missing and lost in action. Virgil Thomson wanted to mount a stateside premiere performance, a promise that never came to anything. But Maderna had already mailed him the score and for years it gathered dust in a New York library until its eventual first performance as recently as 2009 in Venice. And this stolidly professional performance, resonantly recorded, is the work’s first outing on CD.

Mature Maderna usually dazzles, his knack of reformatting convention rarely failing him. But in 1946, two years before Hermann Scherchen introduced him to the music of Schoenberg and Webern and rocked his world, Maderna was immersed in Stravinsky and Hindemith, whose compositional fingerprints are everywhere. The spectre of Verdi looms large, too, in the bulk weight and gothic atmospherics of the writing. A young composer stakes out his terrain and cooks up a Requiem archetype.

Which is not to say there aren’t inventive touches. The robust architectural splendour and unity of Part 1 is impressive indeed, especially the monumentalism of Maderna’s ‘Dies irae’, which maps out harmonic journeys – then typically wanders elsewhere. His choral writing, at least from the perspective of 70 years later, tends towards the gesturally prosaic. Men’s voices intone a rhythmically square response to the word ‘Requiem’, a default setting in more than one sense. But then he experiments with some satisfyingly outré part-writing in the ‘Agnus Dei’, voices floating on weightless, see-through strings.

This work would earn him his merit badge and open the door to grander achievements. But the presence of three pianos is suggestive of the mature Maderna. When the pianos are not bloodying the field with accents pilfered from Les noces, they add discreet background busyness and washes of outlying harmonic colour. In his subsequent orchestral and electronic work, Maderna would become obsessed by the spatial separation of sound. Here he’s already on the case.