Companion pieces are everything. How you frame a work can change how we hear it and how we listen – drawing out connections and correlations, setting a mood, creating a narrative. Where new rival recordings of A Ceremony of Carols (Clare Cambridge – Harmonia Mundi, 11/20; Crouch End Festival Chorus – Signum, page 82) opt for all-Britten programmes, Owen Rees and the Choir of The Queen’s College have treated it as the centrepiece of a Christmas disc.

Taking Britten’s collision of old and new as a starting point, Rees surrounds it with a sequence of traditional and contemporary carols and motets. Works by Michael Praetorius alternate with music by Jonathan Dove, Dobrinka Tabakova and Cecilia McDowall, among others.

Light, agile and bright, The Queen’s Choir are a good advertisement for the traditional Oxbridge sound. Their upper voices – no countertenors here, incidentally – are fresh and agile, youthful enough to catch the innocence of Britten’s cycle without it becoming too knowing, but also have the advantage of mature technique. Speeds can be swifter (both ‘Deo gracias’ and ‘This little Babe’ whip along), dramatic effects more pronounced (‘This freezing winter night’ unsettles as it chills) and the poise greater than any children’s choir. The Nash Ensemble’s Lucy Wakeford is a huge bonus as the harpist, her Interlude vividly atmospheric, melody dropped into the ear like the glistening drips from an icicle, each glissando in ‘Spring Carol’ scattering glittering light and resonance.

The surrounding pieces are just as good. The light-footed ensemble are at their best in the polychoral Praetorius motets, phrases zinging to and fro in In dulci jubilo and Puer natus in Bethlehem, while also finding a tender simplicity for the chorale Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern.

But it’s the newer works that are the real selling point. Rees’s selection is clever, balancing the sweetness of his young singers with earthy, dance-driven carols that hark back to the form’s medieval origins. I defy anyone who hears Toby Young’s exhilarating The Owl not to be humming it a week later, with strong rivalry from both Cecilia McDowall’s pulsing Now may we singen and Dobrinka Tabakova’s irresistibly syncopated Good-will to men, and peace on Earth. Christmas has definitely arrived.