For Christmas, Camerata heads to the Mediterranean

Originally devised by Joel Cohen, the Camerata’s former music director who has now passed the reins over to his wife, the soprano Anne Azéma, “A Mediterranean Christmas’’ delivers more than its unassuming name might suggest. Musical selections spanning seven centuries, and deriving from three monotheistic faiths, are interwoven to produce a kind of light-footed theatrical journey through the regions of the Mediterranean basin. The program, for example, opens with an improvised Arabic taksim, which then seamlessly dissolves into a plaintive Judaeo-Spanish prayer. A Christian song from 13th-century Spain is pierced by the call and response of both a shofar and a Turkish zurna. At this year’s concerts, as on the fine recording the group has made for Warner Classics, the Camerata is joined by members of the locally based Sharq Ensemble, which specializes in traditional Arabic repertoire.

The musical selections assembled for this program, all of them relatively brief, include such real gems as “Lux Refulget,’’ an austere and hauntingly beautiful polyphonic song from 12th-century southern France. Several sun-filled and expansively lyrical songs taken from a collection dated to the 13th-century reign of the Spanish king Alfonso the Wise also brought particular pleasure. The risk for a program like this one is that the journey undertaken comes across as facile musical tourism. But in this case the research and scholarship behind the project, the attention to subtle and organic musical connections, and the thematic grouping of the works around aspects of the nativity narrative gave the program a coherent frame.

Saturday’s performance itself, while not flawless in execution, was still utterly absorbing, with the players conveying a relaxed authority as they hopscotched across religious traditions, ancient languages, and musical styles. Sharq director Karim Nagi suavely dispatched complex rhythms from his riqq, a fish-skin tambourine, and his colleague Mehmet Sanlikol contributed charismatic oud playing and vocals. From the Camerata ranks, Azema and soprano Anne Harley sang with eloquence and casual poise. As an encore, Cohen announced they would be performing a Hanukkah song, for which they needed look no further than their own capacious program: a lively reprise of the Judaeo-Spanish favorite “Quando el Rey Nimrod.’’

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichelr@globe.com.