Set down piecemeal over four and a half years, this collection straddles boundaries but certainly merits a hearing. Its common thread is the participation of the stellar American organist Paul Jacobs, here framing recent material composed expressly for him with hoarier classics.

To be fair, Horatio Parker’s Organ Concerto (1902) is characterised by nobility as well as a certain stodginess, its main stylistic precursor being Joseph Rheinberger, with whom Massachusetts-born Parker studied in Munich. The second part of the opening movement is a surprise: an intimate Andante in which the soloist converses with solo violin, horn and harp. The scherzo-ish Allegretto also proves unexpectedly deft, timpani used at once extensively and with restraint. The score has been recorded before, though not with comparable finesse. At the other end of the programme we have the Variations on ‘America’ concocted by Parker’s most individualistic pupil, Charles Ives, while still in his teens. Non-organists may be more familiar with William Schuman’s orchestral transmogrification. As given in the edition by E Power Biggs, the eight-minute original becomes a kind of extended encore for the soloist alone. Brits cannot but hear the tune as that of our own national anthem.

Of the two newer works for organ and orchestra, Wayne Oquin’s Resilience (2015) has been something of a calling card for Jacobs and a breakthrough for the composer, a fellow faculty member at the Juilliard School. His first orchestral utterance to achieve a commercial recording, its calls and responses entertain over a vaguely cinematic 12 minutes.

Next, a weightier 20-minute concerto typical of a creative voice lost too soon. The late Christopher Rouse’s Organ Concerto (2014) is traditional in form, pugnacious in content. Of the usual woodwind complement only bass clarinet and contrabassoon are retained. A central Lento, which I have seen traduced as ‘sentimental’, is another of the composer’s heartfelt meditations on the nature and acceptance of grief. The outer movements have a hustle and bustle redolent of Hindemith or Carl Nielsen. For me at least, the finale’s return to consonance and affirmation amid a welter of competing cacophonies is not just showy but uplifting. Along the way you’ll find quotations from (or allusions to) Poulenc, Stravinsky, what sounds like Holst (or Holst via Bernard Herrmann), Messiaen, 1970s rock, 1880s Saint-Saëns and more. Rouse wrote the piece ‘the old-fashioned way’ with pencil and paper, on a card table in his living room. That said, its vigorous postmodernism is perhaps unlikely to appeal to devotees of Victorian rectitude.

Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony acquit themselves with distinction throughout and careful miking of the custom-built, 3568-pipe instrument at Nashville’s Laura Turner Concert Hall allows harmonies to register nicely however dense the textures. All these recordings are ostensibly live. As someone once said, play loud or not at all.