David Briggs’s previous Vaughan Williams release for Albion (10/15) was an acclaimed bumper two-disc set ‘Bursts of Acclamation’, recorded in Sacred Heart Church, Wimbledon. This included all of the composer’s original works for the instrument, supplemented by a carefully curated collection of arrangements and transcriptions.

Now, in this 150th-anniversary year, comes another transcriptional feast for which Briggs has returned to Truro, where he was Cathedral Organist and Choirmaster from 1989 to 1994. Since then he has become renowned for his organ transcriptions of symphonies by Tchaikovsky, Elgar and Schubert, as well as no fewer than six of Mahler’s. His lockdown project was to tackle Vaughan Williams’s Fifth, that visionary statement of hope among the increasing desolation of the Second World War.

The symphony’s opening is quite magical, with its ghostly horn-calls and tremendous sense of space and height. Given the large acoustic and the latent power swirling around in the organ’s fan-vault, it isn’t surprising that, occasionally, some contrapuntal detail becomes slightly ‘misty’. This doesn’t detract from the organic unfurling of the movement’s material, which is beautifully judged.

Briggs makes light work of the Scherzo – a veritable tour de force, conquering fiendish hemiolas and Bunyanesque hobgoblins with ease, the quaver flurries skimming along like so much airborne thistlefloss. In the sublime Romanza we are transported back to the opening of the Tallis Fantasia. Does one miss the poignancy of the original cor anglais solo? Up to a point; but this is no mere slavish copy of the original score – rather a reinterpretation. The generous use of 16ft ‘doubles’ on the manuals adds to the general air of lugubriosity. A sense of being rooted to the earth pervades the final Passacaglia while being, in Wilfrid Mellers’s words, also ‘a gateway to Paradise’. The build-up to the alleluias is almost too much, the Pedal Open Wood being especially vividly captured by the microphones.

Briggs’s arrangement of Dives and Lazarus is revelatory, coming across as more of an improvisation. There is much to enjoy, too, in Rupert Marshall-Luck’s unaffected interpretation of The Lark Ascending, violin and organ in perfect accord. In Briggs’s masterly hands, the tonal palette of Truro’s 1887 ‘Father’ Willis is displayed in all its glory. A most rewarding and worthwhile album.