OLIVER Messiaen’s La Nativite du Seigneur, comprising nine musical meditations, is one of the greatest organ works ever written. Played by leading exponent James Lancelot, on Durham Cathedral’s mighty Harrison and Harrison organ, made for a visceral aural experience.

The master of choristers and organist, who recently announced his retirement, took nothing for granted in scintillating recital that revealed the inner facets of the score in all glory.

Lancelot brought 40 years of experience too bear on the performance, making the most of the work's rich cadences and shifting intensities.

The opening of The Virgin and the Child had an almost hypnotic quality, while the reverential steps of the Shepherds in the snow were vividly depicted. Lancelot drew out the tenderness Eternal Purposes with magnificent chords in the lower register that enveloped one in a feeling of warmth.

The Children of God featured a dazzling display of spirited staccato passages and the The Word overpowered the senses with massive descending chord that resonated through the cathedral’s pillars and foundations

One of the most pictorial musical passages of the work evokes a group of angels taking flight to the heavens. Played with supreme delicacy Lancelot created vision of them fluttering to the heavens of wings of gossamer.

Jesus Accepts His Suffering was driven home with lacerating bars and the divine rising to the heavens floated into the ether.

God among Us unleashed the full power of the organ, with thrilling its jags and precipitous plunges. The recital concluded with one last sustained reverberating chord that took the breath away.