Saint-Saëns, hailed by Liszt as the greatest organist of his day, wrote comparatively little music for the organ in terms of his total output and relatively little of it features in organ programmes today (though, ironically, the organ is the cynosure of one of his most popular works, the Third Symphony). Ironic too that, as in his works for solo piano, one has to cherry-pick to find Saint-Saëns at his most inspired and original. Compare, for instance, the arresting early (1857) Fantaisie in E flat, by far the most widely played of his solo organ works, with the lacklustre D flat major Fantaisie and the curate’s egg that is the C major Fantaisie with its magical ending.

Saint-Saëns was organist of La Madeleine, Paris, for 20 years (1857-77) and one of the chief attractions of Ben van Oosten’s survey of the (almost) complete organ works is that they are performed on the magnificent Cavaillé-Coll in La Madeleine that the composer knew so well. It comes hard on the heels of Andrew-John Smith’s three separate discs for Hyperion played on the very same instrument. In terms of recorded sound, there is little to choose between the two. Both are of demonstration quality and wall-shaking sonority, with full and imaginative use made of the vast resources of symphonic colours on offer (Saint-Saëns left directions for registration and timbre only for the early works). Van Oosten adopts brisker tempi throughout: for instance, the gloomy first section of Cyprès et lauriers, a work composed to mark the 1919 armistice, lasts 7'48"; Smith’s Cyprès clocks in at 9'13". (Neither the Hyperion or MDG discs features Lauriers, the imposing second section, which is scored for organ and orchestra.)

Smith includes several forgettable minor works not played by van Oosten as well as the Fantaisie pour orgue-Aeolian, deemed by the composer to be unplayable by hands and feet, lasting over 23 minutes and with a second part for tubular bells. It is not one of Saint-Saëns’s greatest works. Van Oosten’s comes in a three-disc case with all the major pieces and, unlike Smith but greatly to the music’s advantage, plays the two sets of Preludes and Fugues
as a sequence.