There have been only seven Birmingham City Organists since the post was created in 1834, and just four in the past century. Thomas Trotter has already exceeded by six years the previous longest incumbent, his predecessor George Thalben-Ball.

This CD celebrates not only his musicianship but also the great instrument that graces the city’s Town Hall, the four-manual Hills-Willis first installed in 1834 and restored in 2007. ‘It’s like driving a vintage Rolls-Royce’, says Trotter (as opposed to the ‘sparkly new Ferrari’ in Symphony Hall). When the instrument is ‘in repose’, you can hear it breathing, waiting to be fired into life, and producer/engineer Gary Cole has kept this atmospheric ingredient throughout, without fading in and out at the end of each number, a decision I like very much.

Three great organ showpieces provide a framework for the programme, opening with Parry’s Bach-inspired Fantasia and Fugue in G, Op 188 (1913 but begun over 30 years earlier), displaying ‘an energy and integrity that were all too rare in the British organ music of that time’ (David Gammie in his customarily illuminating booklet). Parry’s oratorios Judith and King Saul had their premieres in the Town Hall, as did Mendelssohn’s Elijah in 1846. So great was its success that it has made us rather forget that it was also the venue for the premiere of his earlier oratorio St Paul in 1837. The overture, a fantasia on the Advent chorale Wachet auf (‘Sleepers Wake’), was transcribed by WT Best (1826 97), Liverpool’s Civic Organist for 40 years. It is quintessential 19th-century recital fare, albeit accessible only to virtuosos. Organists who cannot play allegro semiquavers with the feet need not apply.

While these are outstanding, the Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue by the Toronto-born Healey Willan (1880-1968) is overwhelming, a tour de force of ‘brooding mystery, passionate declamation and bravura display’. Wait until the neighbours are out, turn up the volume, give your speakers a thorough workout and yourself a tingle up the spine. Full organ. Blazing magnificence. No one plays this sort of repertoire better than Trotter.

Following the tradition of his predecessors as transcribers for their instrument, he contributes three of his own: ‘Jupiter’ from The Planets, ingenious and complex, Coates’s high-spirited Knightsbridge march with an amazing amount of orchestral detail, and Madeleine Dring’s brief Caribbean Dance, which gives Trotter the chance to use the set of bells installed in 2007, recalling a feature of the original organ. He returns to them again in Karg-Elert’s frothy Valse mignonne.

With Wolstenholme’s charming The Question and The Answer, Kevin Volans’s infuriatingly catchy and rather too long Walking Song (inspired, apparently, by the music of the Ba-Benzélé pygmies of Central Africa) and ending with Rachel Laurin’s exhilarating Étude héroïque, this expertly recorded recital is a fitting tribute to Britain’s greatest living organist. With Birmingham City Council having declared itself essentially bankrupt in September over a £760 million equal pay bill, one can only pray that Trotter can make it to his Golden Jubilee.