It is ironic that in the same decade that many university organ departments are going south because of lack of students, a whole new crop of promising young concert organists has appeared on the music scene. Felix Hell, Ken Cowan, and Paul Jacobs have fused virtuosity and charisma in a way that seemed to have gone to the grave with Virgil Fox and E. Power Biggs, those polar virtuosos of the 1950s and 1960s.

It is not that “they had faces then,” thank you very much Ms. Desmond, but that their musicianship communicated far beyond the clubby circles of organ players and aficionados.

To this short list of young stars the name of Chelsea Chen belongs. The 25-year-old, New York City-based virtuosa played an engaging and technically demanding recital Tuesday (August 4) at the First United Methodist Church of San Diego, under the sponsorship of the American Guild of Organists.

Although Chen appears regularly at national music conventions and major concert series across the continent, her local appearances have a special resonance because she grew up in San Diego, studying both piano and organ with a strong pedigree of local piano and organ teachers who helped launch her studies at Juilliard and Yale.

But few would venture out to a stuffy church sanctuary on a hot night for mere sentimental attachment. Chen’s audience came for musical rewards, and they began from the opening measures of J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, a piece every organist is required to play. Chen redeemed this warhorse at the opening of her program not by playing it faster than the last person to come down the pike, or by adding quirky personal touches that defaced the music. Rather, she took just enough time to allow the flashy rhetoric of Bach’s own phrases to bloom and bounce off each other. She refreshed a shop-worn piece from the inside rather than pumping it up from the outside. Now there is an important lesson for the many young students whom the Guild of Organists brought to the event.

Other large works on the program came from the French Romantic school, the bread-and-butter repertory of those New York organists whose ranks she has joined. Most impressive was her broadly conceived and metrically grounded Finale from Louis Vierne’s “Sixth Organ Symphony.” A challenging toccata with a wicked pedal part, Chen sailed through the challenges unfazed, finding the appropriate fiery organ stops in the large First Methodist instrument to indulge its panache.

She had equal success with the Fugue in Maurice Duruflé’s “Prelude and Fugue on ALAIN,” the lesser composer’s homage to the brilliant young French composer Jehan Alain, whose life was cut short in the opening months of World War II. I did think, however, that Chen’s approach to the Duruflé Prelude was too deliberate and fussy for a large room with so little acoustical sustaining power.

Chen offered a pair of Claude Debussy piano works in organ transcription and made a winning case with her colorful and even dramatic adaptation of “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair,” another piece that most keyboard players know, but not with the insight that Chen brought to the score. Her “Arabesque No. 2” was just a little too filled with busy registration changes to convince me it was born to be played on the organ.

Petr Eben’s popular concert piece “Moto Ostinato,” a crisp neo-classical toccata also suited her style. She disciplined Eben’s bravura flourishes with unflappable metrical rigor.

Her own arrangement of themes from the video game “Super Mario Brothers” belongs to that special category of humorous music that goes back to Leopold Mozart’s amusing “Toy Symphony.” And her inclusion of “Tyrant Lizard King,” a piece composed for her by a Yale classmate who is fixated on dinosaurs, showed her ability to wed humor with virtuosity.