‘Christmas in Puebla’ is to your traditional festive classical album as a spicy, aromatic glass of mulled wine is to a tepid house red. Bursting with rhythm and colour, voices seasoned not just with mellow organ but bright harp and guitars, a belching dulcian, sackbut and, cutting clean through it all, tambourine, castanets and drums. Banish thoughts of cherub-faced choristers in musical soft-focus: this is high-energy, high-definition Christmas, prayer meets party.

This is Christmas from the New World and Spanish expat Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla is our guide. His Christmas Eve motet Joseph fili David and its associated double-choir Mass setting are the thread running through this programme. Heard here arranged for singers and chamber ensemble, it’s a Mass in which thoughts of heaven are often interrupted by earthy celebration, always poised right on the edge of dance. The tussle between the two worlds is captured in the uneven voice distribution of choirs where Choir I, dominated by upper voices, offers a transmuted, haloed answer to the more grounded Choir II.

But lovely though the Mass is, it’s the shorter villancicos that are the real star here. Music director Patrick Allies has chosen a wonderful selection from both Padilla’s contemporaries in Mexico and the next generation. Grooving with syncopation, catchy homophonic choruses alternating with solo verses (both for voices and instruments), Juan García de Zéspedes’s Convidando está la noche is the 17th century’s answer to a Christmas No 1, matched for exhilaration by the swift, conversational exchanges and rhythmic sleight of hand of Francisco de Vidales’s Los que fueren de buen gusto for three chattering female voices. Gentler, a lilting cradle song, Joan Cererols’s Serafin que, con dulce harmonía is also charming.

British vocal ensemble Siglo de Oro dispatch it all with style, more obviously at home in Padilla’s formal polyphony than the exuberant anthems but gamely giving it their all. It does, however, still sometimes sound like what it is: an English choir putting on a Spanish accent. Just a little less beauty and a little more abandon would have made a New World of difference. That said, I’m still buying it for everyone I know this Christmas.