A Music on Main production. At Heritage Hall on Friday, December 12

In the context of a review, it’s probably a little strong to talk about loving what any artistic producer does. But one of the things that I really, really, really like about impresario Dave Pay’s Music on Main organization is that it adheres to rigorously high aesthetic standards while retaining the goofy “Let’s put on a show” charm typical of community-based events. This is particularly true of its revue-style productions, such as Music for the Winter Solstice, which turned out to be a particularly endearing example of the genre.

Opening with electronically modified violin and closing with the audience singing along to a piece they’d never heard before—and one written by a Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, at that—this secular winter treat left its audience aglow with entirely unseasonal warmth. It also left us avid for more from the evening’s de facto star, Caroline Shaw. Since she also happens to be Music on Main’s composer-in-residence, that’s a hunger that will be filled fairly soon, with this solstice performance serving as an appetizing sampler of her many talents.

Shaw was the first on-stage, plugging her violin into a looping pedal and launching into a melodic improvisation that hinted at several different winter songs before solidifying into Winnipeg folk group the Wyrd Sisters’ “Solstice Carole”, which baritone Steve Maddock joined her in singing. It was a gentle introduction, after which Shaw left the stage and pianist Rachel Iwaasa appeared, backing Maddock in “Flood”, an English-language adaptation of “Wasserflut” from Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise. The translation wasn’t the only break from Schubertian tradition: Maddock retained his microphone, which, perhaps counterintuitively, allowed him to give an especially delicate rendering of this beautiful song. Pop music has long known that amplification aids intimacy; is the classical world catching up?

More conventional, though no less lovely, was the Couloir duo’s unamplified rendition of Claude Debussy’s Beau Soir, after which Iwaasa returned to deliver a forceful solo reading of Jean Coulthard’s Image Astrale that brought to mind the whirling orbs of Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. After the sweetly undulating harmonies of Alfredo Santa Ana’s palate-cleansing new commission, “A Short Song for the Longest Night of the Year”, things got even deeper, with Shaw and Iwaasa finding perfect unison on Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel before giving way to Couloir members Ariel Barnes and Heidi Krutzen’s rendition of Caroline Lizotte’s Close, in which extended techniques (prepared harp; the use of a “supple bow” to create haunting cello harmonics) paired beautifully with the folk strains of Scottish traditional music.

And then there was the sing-along. Included with each program was written music for Shaw’s “Winter Carol”, a score so simple even a critic could read it at first glance. But to make things more interesting, Shaw had the audience perform it as a three-part round, accompanied and egged on by all five performers. Even if this had collapsed into confusion, it would have been entertaining, but it didn’t: instead, audience and artists joined forces with surprising and gratifying panache.

Music on Main draws a nice crowd, and deservedly so.