By this time of year, Christmas songs are already stale. “Jolly Old St. Nick” and “Silent Night”(mare) are on repeat in every store and restaurant.

Don’t get discouraged. Trio Mediæval relieves any holiday music anguish with their crystal-clear voices. This group, from Norway and Sweden, sings new arrangements of Scandinavian tunes, English carols and German and Northern European folk songs, mostly in an a capella form. They don’t interrupt their repertoire with explanations, and for 75 minutes on Dec. 3 they kept the glittering soundscape rolling at Portland’s Philip Neri Church.

Performing its “Yule” concert – called a combination of “secular and spiritual music” (its 2024 CD has the same title, though the music is recorded with accompanying instruments) – was part of the Friends of Chamber Music Vocal Arts Series. The concert was sold out, the audience enthusiastic, and the encore ”Alle psalite cum luya,” which went way back to the late 13th or early 14th century in France, ended the performance with only a handful of hurried concertgoers leaving the hall.

Founded in 1997 in Oslo, Norway, the group has changed members a few times, though Anna Maria Friman has been with the trio the entire time. The women’s blended voices sounded like beautifully tuned bells. San Francisco Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman called their sound “as pristine and inviting as clean, white linens.” They effortlessly persuade you to love Christmas music all over again, and to appreciate many tunes you’ve never heard before unless you grew up in Norway or England or studied early Germanic music. Familiar were “Lullay Lullay,” a 15th-century English carol; the 15th-century “Coventry Carol” that begins ”Lully lulla, thou little tiny child,” arranged by the trio’s Linn Andrea Fuglseth; and “A Rose Has Bloomed,” a 15th-century German melody arranged by Fuglseth, on break with Ditte Marie Braein singing in her place.

The singers don’t call themselves sopranos or mezzos or contraltos or anything as restrictive as those categorical titles. They switch up ranges – and their ranges are wide – though Swedish-born Friman sings “mostly high,” Friends of Chamber Music’s Executive Director Pat Zagelow said post-concert. Jorunn Lovise Huson sings in the low range and Braein takes the middle part – usually. With a madrigal group like this, it is more important that the voices blend, than that a voice stands out in operatic virtuosity.

Andrew Smith, a Grammy-winning British-Norwegian composer, created “Lux” for the trio. Based on a Norwegian chant and the Italian traditional melody of “Santa Lucia” or “Sancta Lucia,” it emerged as one of the concert’s most striking pieces. Altogether, the group performed about a dozen songs, several running almost without pause into the following piece. And the concert wasn’t just about them.

Recently new Portland resident and Pulitzer Prize-winning contemporary-classical composer Caroline Shaw, who has been busy with this fall’s Oregon Symphony Orchestra/Gabriel Kahane’s “Sounds Like Portland” festival, made an appearance with her partner Danni Lee and accompanied the group on several songs. The organetta player couldn’t go on this North American tour, so Shaw was picked to replace her. It was a brilliant unusual collaboration, though singing aficionados may have preferred only the voices, and Shaw and Lee did not steal the show.

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Shaw played the violin, sometimes the viola, and Lee – well, from my seat, it was tough to see what this folk-rocker and musician-of-many-genres was playing, though she is known for her electric ukulele and unorthodox use of instruments. Ever versatile with a refusal like Shaw’s to be stuck in a musical box, the two women have a duo called Ringdown, described as an “electronic cinematic pop duo” on their website. But there was no Ringdown in this concert.

“There is No Rose,” an anonymous 15th-century English chant that the trio arranged, added a never-seen-before (at least by me) percussion piece. Shaw, Lee and the three vocalists pulled out scroll-like pieces of different sizes, called “melody chimes,” each with a small mallet that creates a lingering sound. The musicians walked with the scrolls through the audience, using the mallets lightly. Why did I think that was Lee’s idea? It wasn’t. The trio brought them along and told the Reynolds High School students during an outreach moment earlier in the day that the instruments are made in Pennsylvania. 

The songs, of course, had a plethora of Christian references to more than Yuletide trees, Scandinavian-loved light, and family gatherings. The Virgin Mary, Bethlehem, Baby Jesus, and the Son of God turned up regularly, and “hallelujahs” and “glorias” popped in and out of songs like twinkling Christmas lights. If you aren’t Christian or don’t like the religious or “Christian” part of Christmas, you can ignore those references in the songs, all mostly performed in languages other than English, and simply listen to the shimmering voices.