Virtuoso transcriptions for many of Bach’s best-known instrumental pieces, performed on the superb Cavaillé-Coll instrument at Sainte-Clotilde in Paris by its prodigiously gifted titular organist.

Born in 1981, Olivier Penin began playing the piano at the age of five and in 1987 he joined the Schola Cantorum in Caen. In 2004, at the age of 23, he was appointed to the tribune of the great organ of the basilica of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris. This was a remarkable achievement for so youthful a musician, and Penin has become one of France’s most illustrious organists, filling the shoes of such distinguished titulaires as César Franck, Gabriel Pierné and Charles Tournemire and Jean Langlais.

Sainte-Clotilde seems to have attracted so distinguished a lineage of composer-organists in part because of the versatility of the instrument installed there by Cavaillé-Coll in 1859. Frank remarked: ‘If you only knew how I love this instrument… it is so supple beneath my fingers and so obedient to all my thoughts!’ While they bear only a tangential relationship to the North- German organs known by Bach, being much more highly coloured, the Cavaillé-Coll instruments have a clarity of articulation and power that measures up to the composer’s music in its own magnificent way.

This is especially well illustrated in the art of transcription which Olivier Penin both practises himself and celebrates with this recital. He includes his own versions of the Air (‘on a G string’) from the Third Orchestral Suite, and the Sicilienne from the E flat major Flute Sonata, alongside classics of the repertoire, beginning with Marcel Dupré’s dazzling distillation of the Sinfonia from BWV29 (itself an orchestral version by Bach of the Preludio in E from the Third Violin Sonata). Virgil Fox’s Gothically gloomy elaboration of Komm, süsser Tod closes out the recital, which has as its centrepiece a similarly monumental version of the D minor Chaconne (again originally for solo violin) by Henri Messerer.