Isabelle Demers is a Quebec-born organist who revels in the music she plays and the sounds she can produce by way of pipes and air. Her new recording, ‘The Chicago Recital’, goes to glorious extremes, exploring the colouristic and expressive possibilities of the 1928 Ernest M Skinner organ known as Opus 634 at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. From the most delicate phrases to massive sonorities that shake ground and ears, the 8565-pipe Skinner comes across as a symphonic wonder, thanks to Demers’s inspired hands, feet and musical acumen.

Her choice of repertoire has a lot to do with the recital’s success. Demers performs works written specifically for organ as well as her own transcriptions of orchestral selections by Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn. The latter may not convince anyone to abandon the original versions but Demers shows bountiful discernment in her choice of timbres to simulate the instruments and auras in Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty (scenes from Act 2) and Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Scherzo, slightly cumbersome, and Nocturne, tender and magical).

The most striking, even jolting piece here is Max Reger’s Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue, Op 127, a tour de force of compositional skill and harmonic adventure with fascinating sonic twists around every corner. It requires the services of an artist who is unafraid to tackle formidable structural and textural challenges. Demers meets them in a performance of virtuoso sensitivity and grandeur.

She applies the same shining musicality to the remaining works, from Ernest Macmillan’s imperial Cortège académique and Rachel Laurin’s witty Three Short Studies, Op 68, including two delightful bird musings, to Marcel Dupré’s exuberant Prelude and Fugue in B, Op 7 No 1. Acis captures these performances in vibrant sound: those who listen through speakers should expect their walls to vibrate when Demers and Skinner conspire with thunderous alacrity.