David Ashley White’s solo organ works comprise what the composer calls a ‘small but indispensable’ part of his extensive catalogue of anthems, service music and hymns. Played with forceful authority by Daryl Robinson on the magnificent instrument at Houston’s Christ Church Cathedral, this powerful recording shows White’s affinity with the gravity and radiance that only an organ brings – in this case an Aeolian-Skinner, Opus 976, installed in 1938, with 66 stops, 90 ranks and 5045 pipes – and the devotional music that is its core repertoire.

The title-track, A Love So Fierce and Free, has a Shakespearean pace and solemnity tempered by an open American West sensibility. Night Cries was written for a recital at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival and shows off the organ’s full range of possibilities and demands immersed in darker regions, with an appropriately Southern musical drawl.

White’s comprehensive Come, Pure Hearts, commissioned by Robinson for his Master’s recital at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, is a set of often phantasmagoric variations cushioned by a sumptuous deep bass. His Psalm 88, with its songs, pipings and keening played exquisitely by oboist Grace Tice, unfolds with a kind of order Bach would have appreciated.

The recital begins with an exuberantly Bachian Fanfare for St Anthony and ends with the splendid Brewer’s Trumpet. In the midst of it all, White’s hymn tune PROFFITT, featuring mezzo-soprano Sarah Mesko and percussionist Jesús Pacheco Mánuel, captures the hymn’s ‘endless dance of love and light’ with the innocence of a summer night; at 70 seconds it’s also an excellent addition to audiophile playlists.