The trend in Christmas music recordings this winter is away from traditional carols and towards newly written cantatas. First and best of these is 34-year-old organist David Bednall’s Welcome All Wonders, a thrilling sequence of 15 settings of diverse poems and liturgical texts for choir, organ and trumpet. It is performed on this Signum CD (SIGCD335) by the full, rich, men’s and women’s voices of Bednall’s alma mater, Queen’s College, Oxford. “The Slaughter of the Innocents” is the long heart of the work, at first sinister then ghostly, consisting of poems by Longfellow, Prudentius and Christina Rossetti who will be relieved no longer only to be associated with “In the Bleak Midwinter”, or “In the BMW”, in witty ­chori