This is a wonderfully vivid and urgent performance of Poulenc's Organ Concerto by a soloist who was particularly associated with the work and who brings to it an authority and involvement that remind us that he himself was a composer. The music itself seems wholly spontaneous yet is instinct with deep feeling, and its baroque colouring and structure (according to the booklet, it was ''conceived in the style of a Buxtehude fantasia'') will appeal even to those not normally greatly attracted by the formalities of that rich period. The recording is thrilling even if it shows its age in the rather congested string sound, and that should not deter collectors for whom fine performance is rightly the prime criterion in choice of versions. The coda is beautiful, its radiant sadness very neas to the close of Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem written at much the same time, an unbelievable half century ago.
The powerful and intensely felt Gloria is no less successful here, though it is a pity about the noticeable loss of recorded atmosphere between its sections. The Four Motets for a time of penitence are equally compelling in feeling and delivery. Of the alternatives, Marie-Claire Alain plays the Concerto well in both her Rotterdam and Paris versions (both on Erato) and is well recorded, but these more recent performances still do not supersede this EMI reissue, and the bright, skilful American account of the Gloria on Telarc is not wholly idiomatic.'