Jennifer Bate has died at the age of 75. Her father was HA Bates, organist of St James Muswell Hill (1927-78). Though her musical sympathies were very broad, she became known as a specialist of the music of Olivier Messiaen whom she came to know late in his life. He entrusted her the premiere of Livre du Saint-Sacrement at Westminster Cathedral in 1986. She recorded the work as part of her series of Messiaen's complete organ works, recorded on the organs of L'Eglise de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris and St Pierre de Beauvais Cathedral in the Hauts-de-France region for Unicorn-Kanchana (the recordings are now available from Regis).

'I always returned to Messiaen with a sense of the palate cleansed by a different sort of listening,' she told Francis Pott for Gramophone's May 1991 issue. 'In Messiaen it's his sheer space that daunts performers, irrespective of technical accomplishment. I'd discovered a good instinct for this working on his music, and without that experience maybe I wouldn't have had that crucial perception of time to embrace the precision of diapason voluntaries! In both, the tiniest detail must be right, or the whole isn't balanced.'

Another substantial recording project was the complete organ works of Mendelssohn which she reworded for Somm, Vol 3 of which was named a Gramophone Editor's Choice in April 2006. Reviewing the recording, Marc Rochester wrote: 'A third question – would Mendelssohn have approved of Jennifer Bate's performances? – is easily answered. If he wasn't impressed by the easy fluency of her technique or her highly articulate and intelligent interpretations … then he was not the astute and sensitive musician history claims him to have been.'

She also recorded the complete organ works of César Franck (now on Regis) and the complete organ works by Peter Dickinson (Naxos), as well as his Organ Concerto which she premiered and recorded for EMI (now on Heritage). She also recorded earlier organ music, focusing on English repertoire from John Stanley to Samuel Wesley (for Unicorn-Kanchana and later for Somm).

In 1968, Bate married the organist and composer Sir George Thalben-Ball, a union that was annulled in 1972.