Seraphic Fire’s new, Grammy-nominated Christmas album.

No season is so fraught with special events as the Christmas season, which is much closer nowadays to the end-of-year Saturnalia from whence it sprung than it is to a time of devotion (call it Festivus, if you like). But the great corpus of Christmas music, sacred and secular, that surrounds us at this time of year is the element that truly makes it one-of-a-kind. At no other time of year do we all adopt a different soundtrack, and even the alternatives offered us by our technology don’t seem to be changing that.

And as a believer in the importance of ritual in human lives, that’s good with me. And that brings me to the latest news from Seraphic Fire. Earlier this year, the Miami-based professional choir was nominated for two Grammy awards, one of them for a collection of Christmas music.

Last week, the group released another Christmas collection, Silent Night, containing 18 tracks of choral songs old and new for the season. Officials at the ensemble’s home office in Miami say the disc was included in the Christmas collection lineup on iTunes on Monday, and reached the No. 9 spot on the classical Christmas charts (as the screenshot below shows).

Seraphic Fire at number 9.

The disc was recorded on the choir’s own label at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale, and recording engineer D. James Tagg has done quite a good job bringing out the richness and depth of the group’s lower voices, which can sometimes have less of a presence in that church. The recording also has a lovely natural reverb that reminds you that it was made by actual people singing in an actual space. The collection contains traditional songs (The First Nowell; Veni, Veni, Emmanuel; Sweet Little Jesus Boy) and familiar composed carols (Carol of the Bells; Ding Dong Merrily on High; Silent Night; I Wonder as I Wander), as well as art song, including Tomas Luis de Victoria’s O Magnum Mysterium, Thomas Tallis’ Glory to Thee, My God, This Night (actually an arrangement based on a Tallis canon), and Shiloh, by the first great American singing-master, William Billings.

[Here is the first track, The First Nowell.]

The chorus sings all these pieces with strength, beauty and high-gloss sound, varying approaches nevertheless for different styles. The rough-and-ready Billings carol has a pushed, forceful sound that suits its character, and the Tallis song is tightly, closely sung, so that it has a kind of processional majesty. Sweet Little Jesus Boy, a traditional spiritual from the African-American tradition, is sung solo by the choir’s gifted male alto, Reginald Mobley. It’s a tender, intimate performance, beautifully suited the words of regret and reverence (I think it would be every bit as moving with minimal backing harmonies, even if it lost some of the intensely personal focus gained by doing it as a solo).

Several of these arrangements are familiar, such as Kenneth Brown’s of the Tallis canon, Sir David Willcocks’ take on The First Nowell, and perhaps best-known of all, the Peter Wilhousky arrangement of Mykola Leontovych’s Carol of the Bells. Seraphic Fire director and founder Patrick Dupré Quigley contributes to the Willcocks Nowell and adds a careful but effective version of Franz Gruber’s Silent Night that avoids the sing-song rocking of the original carol and is more effective thereby.

In addition to a Preces and Responses by the early 17th-century English composer William Smith, this recording also adds four contemporary works by North American composers: Steven Sametz’s Niño de Rosas, Stephen Chatman’s Little Child in a Manger and Craig Hella Johnson’s Gitanjali Chants share space with an all-faiths piece by Stephen Paulus, Hymn to the Eternal Flame, set to words by the longtime University of Minnesota poetry professor Michael Dennis Browne and composed in 2005 for a Holocaust memorial oratorio.

All four of these works are sung lovingly by Seraphic Fire’s 13 singers and each has its own special virtue. Soloist Lexa Ferrill’s shrill, wide vibrato is distracting (as indeed it was in live performance) in the Sametz piece, but the engineering has buffered some of its harsher edges. Johnson, founder of the fine Austin, Texas-based Conspirare (which shares several members with Seraphic Fire), sets a mystical text by the once-popular Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore mystically, with a wandering, melancholy melody, drone effects and a big, rich bass-heavy coda. Perhaps most effective is Little Child in a Manger, which Chatman, a prominent U.S.-born Canadian composer, adapted from one of his earlier secular pieces to simple but haunting effect.

This is a fine album, and a good addition to the library of serious choral music for the holiday season. I think a truly classic Seraphic Fire Christmas album is still in the future, but those are hard to make, given the vast repertoire at the disposal not just of groups like this, but all of us.

Seraphic Fire is performing its candlelight Christmas concerts this week: Thursday night at St. Gregory’s Episcopal in Boca Raton, Friday night at First United Methodist in Coral Gables, Saturday night at Miami Beach Community Church, Sunday afternoon at All Saints Episcopal in Fort Lauderdale, and the evening of Tuesday, Dec. 18, at Fort Lauderdale’s Sunshine Cathedral. The Boca Raton, Miami Beach and All Saints performances are sold out. For the rest, call 305-285-9060.