After composing La Transfiguration and attending its fraught premiere in Lisbon in 1968, Messiaen quite swiftly worked up into a concert cycle the evening of improvisations he had played for the Feast of the Holy Trinity in 1967. He was 60, and by then in the habit of writing himself back into form at the organ bench having lately spent all his energies on a major work.

When improvising after a service, Messiaen would shout out the scriptural subject from the organ loft at Saint-Trinité – YouTube furnishes some valuable examples – and Tom Winpenny brings the composer’s voice to mind, thundering out the main theme with the kind of austere, plain-spoken grandeur common to his opening gambits.

In the cycle Messiaen unveiled a technique of langage communicable – assigning a pitch, duration and even timbre to A, B, C and so on, to spell out theological concepts – which has come in for some stick. Composing by letters, you could call it. Perhaps Winpenny’s unassuming virtuosity complements this new turn of phrase – previous instalments of his ongoing cycle for Naxos have been judged cool and distant by some of my colleagues, though not by me – but then the Méditations are not the place for perfumed ecstasy any more than Messiaen’s previous large-scale cycle, the Livre d’orgue.

Winpenny’s choice of the Klais organ in the airy acoustic of Reykjavík’s Lutheran church seems admirably suited to Messiaen’s abrupt juxtapositions, and in any case he shades most sensitively the Gregorian-accented melodies (try ‘Dieu et simple’, track 8) while bringing vividly to life the yellowhammer’s persistent chirp and – perhaps my own favourite of his avian objets trouvés – the mournful monotone of Tengmalm’s Owl.

With an excellent recording supervised by Sveinn Kjartansson and usefully demystifying notes by Winpenny himself, it’s another fine instalment in a series that offers a strong, Anglo-Saxon alternative to the sometimes overwhelming splendour of Jennifer Bate in Beauvais and Olivier Latry at Notre-Dame (Regis and DG, 5/02). Anyone in possession of Gillian Weir’s cycle on the Frobenius organ at Aarhus Cathedral (originally on Collins Classics, 12/94, reissued by Priory) will be familiar with the attractions of Messiaen from the cold north.