My introduction to Cameron Carpenter (b1981) was on YouTube last year. The clip showed a young organist in white bespangled T-shirt, tight white trousers and white Cuban-heeled organ shoes playing Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude, its left-hand moto perpetuo semiquavers played on the pedals. It’s astonishing to watch, though, of course, it loses its impact somewhat on disc.

Carpenter is in the American virtuoso tradition of Virgil Fox and Carlo Curley (though both sound positively arthritic when set beside Carpenter) which combines prodigious technical ability and imaginative tonal colouring with ostentatious showmanship and frequent lapses of taste. Take Carpenter’s unnecessary additions to the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV565: do we need to hear it with chimes? Or Grainger’s Blithe Bells, interpolated into Ellington’s Solitude, drowned in molasses? Carpenter’s over-busy adaptations of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No 1 and Horowitz’s Carmen Variations are impressive technical feats but not as viscerally thrilling as on the piano.

Apart from the Revolutionary study, the two performances which filled me with genuine awe are of Dupré’s B major Prelude and Fugue, and Jeanne Demessieux’s extravagantly demanding Octaves (from her Six Etudes, Op 5, of 1944). Carpenter’s rhythmic buoyancy, clarity of voicing and sheer élan are quite masterly: when he plays it straight instead of camping it up he shows what a phenomenally gifted musician he is. I’d like to hear him next on a proper organ instead of this digital poor relation, hoping at the same time that the recording is as lucidly and richly engineered as this.