If it’s spectacular – not to say awe-inspiring – organ sound you want, this is the disc for you. This massive 74-stop instrument, spread across an entire wall of a Berlin church, boasts sparkling mixtures, dazzling en chamade reeds and, most important of all for the organ buffs, a mighty, speaker-crunching 32-foot reed. The Priory recording produced by Geoffrey de Coup-Crank, in whose memory the disc is dedicated, is wonderfully atmospheric and suitably spatial.

If, on the other hand, you hanker for detailed and perceptive performances of this particular programme, most of which is not otherwise currently available on disc, you will be disappointed. For while the organ makes a ravishing sound, clarity of detail, especially in the middle and lower dynamic ranges, is not the order of the day. Ironically, considering his music is so strongly geared towards organ colour, it is Karg-Elert who comes off worse. A glance at the organ’s stoplist shows it should more than adequately meet his detailed registration demands, but in reality it lacks subtlety and balance while louder blasts of sound almost wholly obscure whatever surrounds them. Reger’s already cloudy textures are obscured still further by the church’s generous acoustic, not least in a very un-capricious Capriccio.

Stefan Engels is certainly a player of consid-erable virtuosity, something which comes across in a murky but nonetheless exhilarating account of Fernando Germani’s Toccata composed for the Three Choirs Festival in 1958 and described by Germani – never one to belittle his own skills – as ‘a concert composition of outstanding difficulty’. Engels, clearly at ease on this mighty organ, makes it all seem like an easy Sunday afternoon canter.