An abstruse title maybe, but Masaaki Suzuki flings himself into a programme of invigorating and interlocking toccatas and psalm-settings with the conviction – rightly – that Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck is one of the fathers of modern keyboard. It is music which too readily stalls at the church door of specialist recitals but here is a disc registering the delight of its place as pure concert music. The organ was not used liturgically in Sweelinck’s time at the beginning of the 17th century and the free-flowing and uninhibited whims of the Italianate toccatas and lyrical psalm paraphrases radiate confidently on their own terms.

Suzuki performs on the new Marc Garnier organ of Shinko-Kyokai in Kobe, an instrument of such irrevocable truth and balance of tone that each registration seems to reach into the heart of Sweelinck’s beautifully directed lines (always coloured by the logic of vernacular phrasing) and rhythmic diversions. There is a degree of austerity in Psalms 23 and 116, and this is where the sobriety of Calvin’s Genevan Psalter makes its mark; yet elsewhere dourness only exists in the Fantasia chromatica which finds a more cohesive performance in the hands of Christopher Herrick (Hyperion, 11/03).

Suzuki, elsewhere, is deeply sensitive to the colorific possibilities and reflective nature of the Psalms and far more engaged than Ton Koopman in his variable complete set of keyboard works from 1981 (Philips – nla). The Echo Fantasia is a particularly satisfying work which Suzuki gently unwraps as though it were a Fabergé egg. The notes are very dull and make no attempt to draw the listener into Sweelinck’s highly communicative art. The playing, though, is first-rate.