Almost every new concert hall comes with a huge, inbuilt pipe organ, which is strange considering that they’re hardly ever used.

The number of frequently-performed orchestral works requiring their input is small and solo recitals tend to be supported by the dedicated few. Most modern composers believe the organ to be an elephant in the room, albeit a musical one.

Well, its personality is many-sided, as celebrity recitalists such as Thomas Trotter are apt to illustrate when performing at short, lunchtime concerts such as this.

In just over an hour he pretty much ran the gamut of organ music from the 18th century on, holding back the St David’s Hall instrument as much as possible to invoke the more restrained temperament of Handel’s time for that composer’s Concerto No 16 in F.

Size also wasn’t something Paul Hindemith needed to embrace in the 20th century when, an exile in America, he wrote his Sonata No 3, a delicate three-movement work based on Germanic folksongs.

Nor, perhaps unexpectedly, did Dutch composer Ad Wammes, when he wrote Ride On A High Speed Train, a piece with too much going on to reflect, as Trotter pointed out in his introduction, the silent whoosh of Continental rolling-stock.

While not an overwhelming instrument, the hall’s can give some sign of a bearhug Romantic sound, as in Cesar Franck’s Priere and Bonnet’s more flamboyant Variations de Concert.

Trotter played everything with a flawless technique and an intuitive grasp of how the instrument can blow hot and cool, as it were, and get away with it.