Enormously popular in the first half of the 20th century and largely forgotten and generally reviled during the second half, the organ transcription has swung back into fashion. When organists of the calibre of Olivier Latry release discs of transcriptions, you know that it has come full circle and is once again recognised as a legitimate genre worthy of serious consideration.

Not every transcription on this disc is completely convincing. Kalevi Kiviniemi’s version of Khachaturian’s ‘Sabre Dance’ has something of the character of a medieval joust about it, while Léon Roques’s version of ‘La cathédrale engloutie’ is notably devoid of the swirling atmosphere that makes Debussy’s original so memorable. On the other hand, both Reger and Dupré offer intriguing and distinctly personal views on the music of, respectively, Liszt and Bach, while Liszt himself (Chopin) and the great master of organ transcription Edwin Lemare (Wagner and Saint-Saëns) show how it is possible to create wholly idiomatic organ music without sacrificing the essence of the original. My personal favourite is the beautifully crafted version of Mendelssohn’s Variations sérieuses by Reitze Smits, and the most impressive is Latry’s own spectacular take on Falla’s ‘Ritual Fire Dance’, which ends with such outrageous virtuosity that one suspects only Latry could have got away with it.

Musically convincing or not, what every piece on this colourful disc offers is both a dramatic display of Latry’s breathtaking virtuosity and a glorious aural picture of this huge 91-stop Rieger, installed in the Paris Philharmonie in late 2015. To hear an organist of such talent and an instrument of such remarkable versatility put through their paces like this is a must for all lovers of the big organ sound.