D'Arcy Trinkwon, St John's, Smith Square, London

D'Arcy Trinkwon – the name is not an anagram – is the organist of St Augustine's church in South Kensington, but on Wednesday he took a night off and danced with the Devil. His recital, called The Dark Side of the Moon, culminated in Petr Eben's suite of music for Goethe's Faust in the composer's own adaptation.

The first half was taken up with colourful "novelty" pieces or programme music with similarly dark concerns, drawing a range of exotic sounds that you might not expect from the appearance of the St John's instrument in its formal Baroque case. Eben's winsome "Moto Ostinato" got off to a slightly sluggish start, and the pedal division showed its customary reluctance to speak, or at least to be heard, promptly, though Trinkwon's elegant hands, relayed on to a screen, hopped fluently across three manuals.

Vierne's "Feux Follets" flickered picturesquely, but a much bigger challenge was offered by Trinkwon's own transcription of Liszt's mighty, but over-long, "Vallée d'Obermann". Its throbbing chords didn't work very well in this comparatively dry acoustic. Still, Trinkwon made a brave attempt to meet Liszt's rather meretricious grandeur. "Undine", a short and modest piece by the Swiss organist, Markus Braun, was charming. "Scènes d'Enfants", by Trinkwon's teacher, Jean Guillou, was quite the opposite. Inspired by Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, this was scare-mongering music of percussive shock tactics, during which the organ reacted with some sort of mechanical failure that necessitated some quick-thinking rescue action by the player.

The problem seemed to have been sorted out during the interval, ready for Eben's Faust Suite, prefaced by Reger's setting of the chorale, "Aus tiefer Noth", which dominates the Suite's final movements. Eben is a saintly soul, though with a weakness for ear-tickling harmonies, but his Faust music does ample justice to Mephistopheles's part in the drama. Even the "Prologue in Heaven" is more flashy than radiant, while the movements concerned with Faust alone are energetic to the point of belligerence, and the tavern and Walpurgisnacht scenes are so vividly rumbustious, they suggest an operatic context.

An ingenious repeated-note effect in the "Gretchen" movement presumably represented her spinning wheel, though it could have been her sobbing, perhaps both. Even the Epilogue, in which Good supposedly vanquishes Evil, left a slightly sour taste. What a pity that this intricate programme, so adroitly negotiated, attracted such a small audience.