Modal tunes and harmonies can all too easily coalesce into an undis-tinguished porridge. Happily, this is hardly ever the case here because Langlais often energises his music with jagged, even jazzy, rhythms, imaginative textures and harmonic progressions that really progress. For the most part he also says what he has to say and then stops (the only exception here being the 15-minute Pièce for flute and organ).

Modality in any case is only one resource in Langlais’s harmonic armoury, the other being a post-Debussyan chromaticism akin to that in the early Préludes by his friend and fellow student Olivier Messiaen. The pieces I enjoyed most were the Diptyque for the unusual combination of piano and organ, full of brilliant and relevant figuration; the Final for two organs, which provides an upbeat recessional for those rare churches that have two matching instruments within hailing distance of each other; and especially the Trois oraisons for soprano, flute and organ on plainsong themes, the last two of which should carry a warning for parishioners of a conservative disposition.

The piano tone is not ideal, particularly in louder passages, and I would encourage Classico to take a little more trouble with their booklets. Only one of the nine works is given a date (I can add 1974 for the Diptyque); Langlais and Messiaen were most certainly not in ‘Dupré’s last class of students’, and the plainsong hymn ‘Jam sol recedit igneus’ has nothing to do with the flames of hell but is set for Vespers on Trinity Sunday and refers to the setting sun. The performances, though, are excellent and the engineers have managed well in balancing the organ against the rest.