Here’s a good old-fashioned town hall organ recital of the kind that had people queuing round the block in the decades before the advent of the gramophone and radio. For instance, Edwin Lemare’s recitals in the late 1890s at St Margaret’s, Westminster, attracted crowds so great that not only were people turned away but police had to clear a way for his carriage.

Lemare, certainly the most innovative transcriber of orchestral works for the organ during his lifetime (1865-1934), is represented here by Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor Overture and Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. If you didn’t know, you would think they were both original works for the organ. The latter incorporates a spectacularly demanding example of Lemare’s speciality – thumbing down, ie where the thumb stretches down to play the melody on one manual while the four fingers of the same hand play the accompaniment on the manual above. In the second battle scene of Tchaikovsky’s score, Lemare asks for both hands to thumb down simultaneously. Byram-Wigfield’s first-rate booklet reproduces that passage from the score. ‘Seldom,’ he comments wryly, ‘has this technique been used to such a challenging extent.’

What else makes this recital particularly appealing is the clarity of texture with which the Rochdale organ is captured (by producer/engineer Paul Baxter). The 1912 four-manual Binns instrument (restored by Walker & Sons in 1979) offers all the orchestral colours and dynamics you could wish for in this repertoire, no details of which are lost, as is frequently the case in a cathedral setting. Pedal definition is especially good. Apart from Byram-Wigfield’s virtuosity and fluent registrations, there are the further bonuses of his own transcription of the Prelude to Act 1 of La traviata (highlighting the Binns’s vivid string stops) and the rarity of Spohr’s Overture to his 1823 opera Jessonda transcribed by the great WT Best, Lemare’s predecessor as the organ’s pre eminent exponent.