For her recital debut album on Signum Classics, Anna Lapwood has chosen an unusual programme that includes three transcriptions of music by composers not usually associated with the organ, one by a composer who left organists more than enough to be going on with and a handful of modern original pieces.

Until Timothy Bond unearthed three slight pieces in 2004, organists wanting to play music by Britten were confined to the terminally dreary Prelude and Fugue on a Theme of Vittoria. Lapwood attempts to address that deficiency with her own transcription of the Four Sea Interludes. It works here largely because of the evocative and, at times, spectral quality of the Ely Cathedral organ. She has also transcribed Messiaen’s wordless song Vocalise-Étude, which, because it inhabits much the same ground as the organ Diptyque, does make effective organ music.

Ravel never went near the organ as a composer, so three movements from Le tombeau de Couperin transcribed by Erwin Wiersinga is the best most organists have to go on. Intrigued by the colouristic potential of the music, Lapwood seems rather more interested in exploring the more unusual qualities of the Ely organ than conveying a convincing interpretation of Ravel’s music – but it does open up rarely visited corridors of the organ, which makes for fascinating listening. Much more idiomatic to the organ is Guilmant’s transcription of a movement from Debussy’s String Quartet. Aided by some simply divine registration choices, Lapwood gives it a wonderful aura of tranquillity.

In Taking Your Leave, Cheryl Frances-Hoad offers a series of aggressive scales interspersed with spasmodic figures, all played here with grim velocity, while Patrick Gowers provides one of the very few moments of light-hearted fun with An Occasional Trumpet Voluntary, which Lapwood delivers with nicely nuanced syncopations and pleasingly light registrations. At completely the other end of the scale, Kerensa Briggs’s slow and reflective Light in Darkness oozes a Frenchness that suits this instrument, and in particular the building itself, while Nadia Boulanger’s Improvisation receives a suitably atmospheric performance. Owain Park’s Images is also intended to show off both the instrument and the building, and does so in a series of short bursts that somehow fail to coalesce into a coherent whole.

Taken overall, then, this is a programme in which the organ seems rather more the focus of attention than either the music or Lapwood herself. Nevertheless, lovers of exotic organ effects will find plenty to satisfy them in this atmospheric recording.