This is the first recording of the rebuilt and enlarged Walker organ in St Cuthbert’s Parish Church, Edinburgh. It’s an imposing instrument, comprising a gallery organ and north Chancel organ controlled from a four-manual console In the south Chancel. It is shown off to good effect on this disc by organist Thomas Laing-Reilly in a programme of chorale preludes and variations on Christmas carols. William Best’s A Christmas Fantasy on Old English Carols opens the disc, a ten-minute Victorian romp through a medley of carols ranging from God rest ye merry gentlemen to The Boar’s Head Carol. More serious musical territory is entered with a well-chosen selection of seasonal chorales by Pachelbel, JS Bach and his cousin Johann Bernhard Bach. Max Reger’s Weihnachten, atmospheric variations built on two German chorales, is rarely heard; Laing-Reilly makes a persuasive case for it, with impressively graded crescendi and diminuendi. Cochereau’s imposing improvised variations on Adeste Fideles (transcribed by Jeremy Filsell) fare much better here than the somewhat unimaginative performances of three French noëls by Dandrieu and d’Aquin – but the Guilmant Noël Ecossais is a charming discovery, and Jeanne Demessieux’s chorale prelude on Adeste Fideles is a delightfully quirky pastoral musette. Reflective music by Ireland (The Holy Boy), Somervell and Hollins takes us to the final work, a dazzling, joyous Toccata-Prelude for Advent on von Himmel Hoch by Garth Edmundson that makes full use of the organ’s Cymbelstern. This is a most enjoyable disc that successfully balances the old and the new, the familiar and the less familiar in a celebration of Advent and Christmas.

Reviewed by Anne McAlister