A new entry into the Boston Christmas music scene made its debut this week and looks like could be returning for many years to come. “The Pipes of Christmas,” a seasonal concert that the Learned Kindred of Currie has produced in New York for the past 26 years, debuted to a packed and enthusiastic audience at the Old South Church on Thursday.

As the name implies, the Scottish bagpipes took pride of place, but the ensemble and its repertory range far beyond. Their program in certain ways echoes A Christmas Celtic Sojourn produced for a quarter century by WGBH’s Brian O’Donovan. Nothing can truly soothe the aching emptiness left by his untimely death in 2023, but the Pipes of Christmas provide a welcome balm by offering music from across the Celtic world whose audience in Boston is strong.

Few sounds could have been be more stirring than the Scottish pipes processing through Old South’s oak-lined sanctuary. Six pipers piping, four drummers drumming, and mallets twirling could have been overwhelming. But under the careful modulation of music director Steve Gibb, the pipes blended with a superb five-man brass section and several other instruments.

They opened with “Highland Cathedral,” a simple tune made haunting by the pipes that can simultaneously send shivers down the spine and bring a tear to the eye. Composed by two Germans in 1982 for highland games held in Berlin, it shows the reach of this music that has emerged from the Celtic culture that once spread across Europe north of the Apennines.

Christmas music quickly followed with a solo bagpipe offering “Joy to the World” backed by the brass who folded their burnished sounds around one another’s as if they have been performing together for years. But, as it happens, they are students at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee College of Music and have been making playing together only for a semester. They names are worthy of mention: Cameron McCarty, C.J. Waldrop, Freddie Poor, Angus Tsui and Clayton Frank. Watch this space.

The horns sounded their best in a heart-stopping arrangement of “Amazing Grace” by John Kuzma and Douglas Haislip. The horns and pipes cascaded around and over each other as they took those familiar five notes and transformed them into something of great beauty and power of redemption.

 Hard to believe, but the pipes and horns had never played together until a rehearsal earlier in the day. While the core musicians are all from New York, the pipers are local to Boston and members of the Commonwealth Pipes and Drums. The seamless blending of so many disparate musical elements in so short a time makes their performance all the more remarkable. Undergirding it all was the nuanced playing of organist William Peek.

“The Wexford Carol” unfolded in a sweet tonal purity by Madelyn Monaghan, who later in the evening movingly performed “Silent Night” in Irish. Behind her, Caitlin Warbelow alternately coaxed heartache and exuberance from her fiddle. Chris Ranney, when not on the piano, provided sweet accordion and harmonium accompaniments. And Cameron MacDougall, who, like the pipers was in kilt and sporran, gave texture to the music with the rarely heard border pipes and an array of tin whistles and wooden flutes.

Thought-generating spoken passages from Celtic writers as diverse as St. Kilda, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson urged that we “close the door on hate and open the door on love.” Susan Porterfield Currie read these with a gentle brush of a Scottish lilt. And James Robinson in a full Glaswegian accent provided an especially moving reading of the “Christmas Gospel according to Luke.” The familiar words took on a fresh richness in his Scots dialect.

In a night with no shortage of sentiment, no moment achieved more poignance than when Lindsay O’Donovan responded to a standing ovation as part of a tribute to her late husband. Christmas, she said “felt a little dark last year without Brian, but this music will carry us through the darkness and be the light in our lives.” And she added, “when the pipers start, their music fills your whole soul.” Indeed it did

Stephen Landrigan is a former print journalist and concert presenter.