A decade on, and Gabriel Jackson’s award-winning collaboration with Benjamin Nicholas and the Choir of Merton College, Oxford, The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (4/19), gets a major follow-up. Premiered last year and now recorded for the first time, The Christmas Story also reunites Jackson with Simon Jones, who once again collates the patchwork libretto for this large-scale choral project.

Christmas may be the headline here but it forms only one panel of four – each a meditative sequence of motets, antiphons, responsories and Gospel settings – that take us from Advent right through to Candlemas. Jones shapes and paces his drama astutely, zooming in on the human – a lurching dance at the Cana wedding, the musings of the pregnant Mary, the ‘bit and plough’ hanging ready for the working day in the Bethlehem stable – while also panning out to the mystical, combining the narrative of the Gospels with contemplation, first-person episodes in contemporary verse with Latin liturgical texts.

Musically, there’s a strong relationship with Jackson’s Passion. The alto saxophone is back, an arresting solo voice, nodding as much to shofars as shawms and trumpets – a bit ancient and a lot modern, especially when framed by the other musicians of the 12-strong Oxford Contemporary Sinfonia. A busy percussionist moves between (among others) glockenspiel, vibraphone, tubular bells and tambourine in a score filled with light, whether that’s cool glints and shards of tuned percussion or glowing organ radiance.

Jackson clearly relishes the set pieces, their character deftly shaped by conductor Benjamin Nicholas: there’s a folksy drone and stamping drum-and-lower-voices music for the shepherds, that bibulous wedding dance for nimble flute and violin and a swaggering tambourine, and a hazy-radiant ‘O magnum mysterium’ ripe for excerpting – voices blurred in echoing, asymmetric movement, haloed by the gentle resonance of a vibraphone.

Merton’s excellent Girl Choristers, bright and focused, diction immaculate, supply the oratorio’s chorale-like moments of pause: a series of motets for unison voices and organ setting the words of Merton-affiliated contemporary poets Penny Boxall and Mary Anne Clarke. Brittenish organ accompaniments (efficiently played by Owen Chan and François Cloete) offer textural variety against the unchanging vocal unison but are symptomatic of a work in which the voices play straight man to the ensemble’s more radical wild card.

There’s often a strangeness to The Christmas Story – of instrumentation, style, text – that helps refocus the ear on a story blurred by over-familiarity. Jackson builds musical bridges out to his more radical gestures, though, helping the listener across to new territory, and strong advocacy from Nicholas and his musicians does the rest. It’s another appealing and viably enduring contribution to the repertoire from an institution putting its commissioning money where its mouth is when it comes to the choral tradition.