Every now and then you hear a new work and feel that excitement, the knowledge that here is a piece that is going to become part of the landscape. Rooted in tradition but with a voice of its own, immediately appealing but refusing to reveal everything at first listen, Francis Pott’s At First Light – recorded here for the first time by the Oxford-based chamber choir Commotio – is one such piece.

Described by the composer as a ‘semi-secular requiem’, At First Light follows in the footsteps of other Anglican settings, assembling an original collage-text that includes words from the Mass for the Dead, Ecclesiastes and the Psalms alongside poetry by Kahlil Gibran, Thomas Blackburn and Kentucky’s Wendell Berry. The effect is one of softening and consolation, words that bridge the gap between the dead and the living, dissolving the distance and formality of the liturgy in personal meditation and response.

A solo cello (sensitively and expressively played here by Joseph Spooner) sings a long, lyrical threnody that runs right through the work – a constant thread of hope that gradually draws the unaccompanied choir out of the muted doubt of the opening (pleas for salvation emerge hushed, uncertain, low in the voices) into the quiet affirmation and unexpected radiance of the work’s final cadence. The only time the cello falls silent is in the 10-minute motet at the centre of the work. An exhilarating, dance-filled double-choir setting of Psalm 150, it’s a primary-coloured keystone for a work painted in subtle shades – echoes of Howells but also Frank Martin and Pizzetti in its broad genealogy.

Always precise, contemporary music specialists Commotio and music director Matthew Berry mirror the composer’s careful text-setting in their phrasing, chasing ‘polyphonic burnout’ in the demanding motet with impressively controlled energy. The tone however, especially in the upper voices, is noticeably lighter and more brittle than in previous recordings (including their first Pott disc, ‘In the Heart of Things’ – 2/12), giving listeners a clear outline of the musical skeleton, but not always with much meat on its bones.

At First Light is paired here with another Pott premiere – the half-hour cantata for choir and organ Word, originally commissioned as part of the Merton Choirbook project. Knottier and more introspective than At First Light, wrestling with its theologically and spiritually dense collection of texts, it’s a work shyer in giving up its secrets – serious, considered, a musical meditation as much as a setting.