Richard Pinel’s recital celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Harrison & Harrison organ in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. It also reflects the vision of Sidney Campbell, the director of music at the time, who ensured that the rebuild reflected his own predilection for Baroque, French Romantic and 20th-century repertoire. Pinel is currently Assistant Director of Music and there can be no doubt of his technical accomplishment – three demanding pieces, not least the five-movement Vierne and the storm section of Roger-Ducasse’s Pastorale, where the main theme is played in semiquavers on the pedals. He is also an excellent colourist, especially fond of the softer tones – so soft at times that at an average volume level the music is barely audible.

But for all this, there is something missing. And that is drama. Where the music should thrill, it doesn’t. Where it should allure, it sounds dutiful. Virgil Fox, for all his faults and hammy presentation, hits you in the solar plexus with the first movement of Vierne’s Symphony No 2 (the Aeolian-Skinner organ of Riverside Church, New York in 1959) on EMI, if you can track it down, a highlight being the central cadenza/crescendo over a long pedal A natural (far too prominent from Pinel, as is the similar section in the finale over a pedal A flat). To hear this work in its full Cavaillé-Coll garb, though, turn to Pierre Cochereau in Notre-Dame (Solstice, 2/01) who invests the first and last movements (and the end of the Choral) with a vehement magnificence that St George’s can only hint at.

Duruflé’s popular Suite, Op 5, is played with equal assurance by Pinel but I struggle to equate this and the other performances here with the opinion of All Music Guide (quoted on the back cover) that ‘With a touch like water over rocks and a tone like the wind through the leaves, Pinel’s playing is a force of nature’.