Organists devising a chronological programme invariably come unstuck in the period between Bach and Mendelssohn. The orchestral symphony, the string quartet and the piano sonata may have all been coming into their own but the organ was woefully overlooked. Yet Mozart is credited with having described the organ as the King of Instruments, while Beethoven began his professional musical life as an organist. What happened?

Iain Quinn has gone some way to addressing those missing years in the organ repertory by rooting out pieces by Mozart, Beethoven and Hummel. His carefully researched booklet notes suggest that the void has traditionally been filled by transcriptions, but these are also the mainstay of this programme. Most notable of these are the three musical clock pieces by Mozart – Quinn plays them with understated charm and elegance on the sweet-toned stops of the 1976 Metzler organ of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Five of the Beethoven pieces were also devised for a musical clock. Mercifully Quinn does not include Beethoven’s most notorious musical clock piece – Wellington’s Victory – and instead turns to five inoffensive miniatures which offer up innocuous vignettes of Beethoven trying (but failing) to match the genius of Haydn’s musical clock pieces. The two Preludes are transcribed from piano pieces, leaving only the Fugue as a potential Beethoven original organ piece; Quinn suggests it was written as an examination piece for the position of assistant court organist in Bonn in 1794. If so, it seems the examiners were never expected to hear the piece through to the end – invention fails after just a few bars.

That leaves us with a handful of possibly genuine organ pieces by Hummel. There are grandiose gestures in the Prelude in C minor but the rest is all pretty stodgy stuff, alleviated here only by Quinn’s carefully registered, neatly articulated and ideally paced playing.

The disc presents some exquisite playing, a very fine recording and plenty of historical interest, but musically it has nothing to enlighten those organists looking for the missing link between Bach and Mendelssohn.