Great British concert organists are among the best in the world and they don't fly higher in this country than Thomas Trotter.

It would be interesting to know what he now thinks of the St David's Hall organ, a three-manual structure built in 1982 for the opening of the building. Subsequently bedevilled by problems, it underwent modification in 1990.

It now plays as well as it probably ever will, so that Trotter's recital was a good illustration of the argument that top-flight organists are those who transcend rather than wrestle with the instrument's sometimes idiosyncratic ways.

Mozart’s Adagio and Allegro (K.594), which would have been written for a smaller organ than the hall’s, is in parts upbeat and martial and in others reflective and elegiac, both moods perfectly captured and contrasted.

Trotter switched nimbly between the middle (‘Great’) and lowest manuals on the console for J. S. Bach's Toccata and Fugue and D Minor (the Dorian), stretching out confidently in the fugue's exhaustive musical journey.

Rubrics, a liturgical suite by Dan Locklair, is down-home folksy in the manner of much contemporary music from America, but has its moments. Saint-Saens's Fantaisie in E flat bookended the recital with Trotter's arrangement of Coates's The Princess Elizabeth March, which opened it and immediately established the organist’s extrovert character.

Many originally believed the hall's organ to be out of synch with the acoustics. But these are matters for experts. Trotter's way with it was that of a virtuoso bringing out the best of what it has to offer.

The recital was the latest to be organised by the go-ahead Cardiff Organ Events, a non-profitmaking group established in 1988 to promote recitals and the use of the city's best instruments. The group can be contacted at 40, St Augustine Rd., Heath, cardiff CF14 4BE.