Thierry Fischer is pursuing an admirable mission to introduce 20th-century French and Swiss music to the BBC National Orchestra of Wales audience, and Arthur Honegger's Cantate de Noël was his unusual choice of companion piece to Bach's Magnificat in D. Honegger would have been flattered by the pairing since his own preoccupation with counterpoint stemmed from a profound admiration of Bach.

The cantata mixes sacred texts with German and French Christmas carols. These traditional melodies have an essential simplicity, heightened here by the angelic purity of Tewkesbury Abbey's Schola Cantorum and the Dean Close School Chapel Choir contrasting with the richness of the BBC National Chorus of Wales. But it was the cumulative effect as Honegger wove the carols into a complex web of sound that emerged strikingly.

Bach's original Magnificat in E flat included four interpolations specifically relating to Christmas, but he removed them from the later D major version; in this context, they were notable for their absence. Nevertheless, the festive ring of bright trumpets and drums was ample compensation, and the soloists - Joanna Lunn, Sophie Daneman, William Towers, James Gilchrist and James Rutherford - could not have been bettered. Lunn's Quia Respexit and Towers and Gilchrist's duet Et Misericordia, with its obbligato for two flutes, were particularly beautiful. Where the BBC COW voices - nearly a 100-strong - had worked well for the Honegger, they seemed on the heavy side for Bach, but with music as uplifting and joyful as this it didn't detract much.

Beethoven's Second Symphony had prefaced the two choral works, but Fischer may have been holding his energies in reserve, because this was distinctly lacking in the vitality it needed to be a proper makeweight.