Apologies for the advance seasonal selection, but this is as classy as Christmas albums come: music from an important Swedish archive of northern European baroque music (the Düben collection at Uppsala University), delivered with razor-sharp clarity by Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices and on luminous period instruments. Works are grouped thematically (Advent, Shepherds, Nativity, Epiphany) with images of light, dark and wonder underpinning all of them, and special attention given to the elegant and multicoloured music of Dietrich Buxtehude. Elsewhere we get gems by Franz Tunder, Buxtehude’s successor as organist in Lübeck, and a splendid bit of vocal polyphony by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. The recording was made in an 18th-century church in Copenhagen, all wood and clean surfaces, and its pristine sound will make an airy, lissom antidote to general excesses of the season.
