This wonderful new recording casts a dazzling light on composers whose names are as obscure as their music is revelatory. Mozart from an unfettered South America?

If Mozart had been living and working in 18th-century Rio de Janeiro, might his music have sounded like this?

José Maurício Nunes Garcia (Father Maurício) was a Brazilian composer, conductor (he directed the first Brazilian performance of Mozart's 'Requiem'), organist and priest who lived—from 1767 to 1830—in Rio, and the Christmas Mass ('Missa pastoril para a noite de natal') recorded on Ex Cathedra's 'Brazilian Adventures' album is pure delight. The version performed here dates from 1811 and features some deliciously florid writing for clarinets, brilliantly played by Katherine Spencer and Margaret Archibald.

As the conductor Jeffrey Skidmore notes, the work's gently pastoral tone 'captures perfectly the sensation of a sunshine-filled Christmas and the gentle message of Christ's birth' and would be the perfect start to Christmas morning. And an encouragement to explore other music from the composer's catalogue: a substantial one of some 240 works, including what appears to have been the first opera written by a Brazilian composer.

The cover is a detail of Brazil and the Amazon taken from a complete map of the Americas (north and south) from the late 17th century. The cartographer has lavished especially imaginative treatment on the waters of the surrounding South Atlantic, which teem with the superabundant life imagined by the psalmist: 'There go the ships, and there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to take his pastime therein.' Not to mention turtles, whales and flying fish: all aquatic life is here …