The Jervaulx Singers, formed in 2021, are eight professional singers, named after Jervaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire. They are versatile enough to cover standard church choir repertoire (Elizabeth Poston’s Jesus Christ the apple tree receives a stand-out performance here) and include plenty from the initial Carols for Choirs volumes, but also an exciting range of other Christmas music – not carols at all, but justifying the subtitle ‘Christmas reflections’. Debussy’s Noël des infants qui n’ont plus de maisons is a striking piece composed during the First World War. With an angry text and hard, driven accompaniment, children sing at Christmas time about the destruction of their homes, school and church. It was Debussy’s final solo-voice mélodie, sung here in the composer’s upper-voice chorus version.

Of two pieces sung by solo voices, Fauré’s Noël describes the visit of the magi with their gifts to the infant Jesus and urges us to ‘imitate their pious example’. ‘Must the winter come so soon?’ is Erika’s opening aria in Samuel Barber’s opera Vanessa. Its gentle, beautiful melancholy may have little to do with Christmas, but evokes a seasonal stillness. A short carol, In the stillness by Sally Beamish with words by Katrina Shepherd, provides the title track: it is a real ‘Christmas reflection’, evoking a winter scene with soft, fresh snow and candles glowing in a church, as we wait for a ‘child soon to be born’. The whole CD is a varied tour through unexpected seasonal landscapes, imaginatively chosen and beautifully sung.