With its four manuals and 5,432 pipes, the organ at Shadyside Presbyterian Church can create a seemingly infinite number of distinct timbres. Rachel Laurin utilized this instrument's timbral spectrum to bring out the inner drama of her repertoire at a Sunday recital that showcased this particular instrument's extreme dynamic range through music from the 17th and 21st centuries.

The highlight of Laurin's technique was her footwork. In Buxtehude's "Praeludium in G-minor," she portrayed the exuberance of the final outburst, trading the musical lines seamlessly from her feet to her hands. The over-the-top quality of these seemingly concluding measures sets up the work's true, quirky and humorous ending. Laurin achieved the shy personality of these measures, displaying her ability to depict a range of performance personas.

Despite some rhythmic imprecision at the opening of Bach's "D-major Prelude and Fugue," Laurin's registrations brought out both the musical lines in Bach's tapestry and the different characters of theses lines, turning the prelude into a compelling drama of sounds. In the fugue's ending, she expertly brought the timbral focus to the main voice, portraying the secondary lines as swirling textures, supporting and rushing the theme to its end.

The majority of Sunday's program, an Organ Artist Series of Pittsburgh concert presented in cooperation with Music in a Great Space, came from Laurin's pen. An associate composer of the Canadian Music Center, Laurin drew six miniatures from her "Twelve Short Pieces." The best work from this collection of generally clear vignettes was the "Intermezzo."

Laurin's "Introduction and Passacaglia on a Theme by Raymond Daveluy" found much of its success in her emphasis on the organ's antiphonal pipe structure, portraying Daveluy's theme as a meditative, jocular and forbidding inspirational musical source. "Passacaglia," in tandem with her "Etude Heroique," showed the audience that as a composer, Laurin has a strong grasp of dramatic musical structures.