When it comes to the organ music of César Franck, we are spoilt for choice; there is not so much a surfeit of Franck on disc as an abundance of impressive recordings. Many make use of notable Cavaillé-Coll organs – the natural stomping ground of Franck’s organ music – and nearly all of them catch players at their most inspired. That is certainly the case here. When I reviewed the Finnish organist Pétur Sakari’s previous album of French organ music (5/14), I was not overly impressed. It’s a very different story here. From the brilliance of his playing, the instrument chosen and BIS’s superlative recording, this stands out as something quite exceptional, even in the crowded field of outstanding Franck recordings.

Sakari is unquestionably a brilliant player but in repertory such as this, where virtuosity takes a back seat to musical insight and interpretative depth, he shows something very special. His interpretations mix the long tradition of Franck performances with something distinctively his own. At first taste, some of his tempos feel extreme, especially in the ‘Pièce héroïque’, but on second and third hearings these all seem entirely natural, and fourth time round, I find myself utterly convinced.

Most impressive in Sakari’s interpretations is the handling of those long pauses with which the composer littered his organ-writing – places where one can imagine Franck taking his hands off the manuals to grapple with fistfuls of hefty Cavaillé-Coll stop-knobs, or simply taking a momentary rest from the strain of inspiration. While many players see these as breathing points, places to assemble the troops, as it were, before going into the next stage of battle with Franck’s intellectual and emotional challenges, Sakari integrates them into the narrative flow, not so much as dramatic pauses as moments of mouth-watering anticipation – the sorbets between the dishes. Nowhere is this more brilliantly done than in the closing three minutes of the Second Chorale, where we also get a taste of the sumptuous sound of this glorious instrument of Orléans Cathedral, with its spine-tingling pleno, silvery Montres, delightfully insouciant flutes and endearingly bleating Voix humaine, as well as the tremendous dynamic and pitch range of BIS’s stunning SACD sound. This is a truly outstanding recording of Franck’s organ music.