Peter Boorman was a musician of rare versatility who proved remarkably adept at operating on all sides of the musical divide. Orchestral player, harpsichordist, teacher, accompanist, and, he was for 25 years the distinguished organist and master of the choristers at St Davids Cathedral, Pembrokeshire. There, in February 1963, he was the first to introduce female voices into the fabric of a cathedral choir — a claim that was disputed and led to a lively correspondence on the letters page of The Times in 1993.

Peter William Boorman was born in Walkern, Hertfordshire, in 1923, the middle son of a cycle shop owner. He was educated at Alleyne’s Grammar School, Stevenage.

The organ first cast its spell upon him when he was a church choirboy, but his initial intention was to become an analytical chemist. However, while he was serving with the Royal Armoured Corps during the war, the influence of a fellow member of his unit, Harry Gabb, then organist of Llandaff cathedral, proved decisive.

After he was demobbed in 1945, his professional musical career began in earnest with appointment as organist of St Nicholas’s Church, Stevenage. There, in partnership with a parishioner, the distinguished composer Elizabeth Poston, he founded and later successfully developed Stevenage Musical Society. At the same time, working under the auspices of Hertfordshire Rural Music School, he helped to pioneer music education throughout the county. Farther afield, he played double bass with all the main London orchestras, his talents as a harpsichordist also finding a ready outlet as a continuo player.

In 1953 Boorman found a particularly happy and expressive outlet as organist and master of the choristers at St Davids Cathedral. His arrival there proved particularly propitious, coming as it did with the welcome opportunity to modernise the rather fine 1883 Willis organ. Although this instrument was small by cathedral standards, in updating its action, adding both a new case and console, Hill, Norman & Beard provided a most colourful palette for its new custodian.

Amid a splendidly natural technique, instinctive rather than intellectual, Boorman’s virtuosic organ playing was capable of making an immediate effect. He was equally impressive as an accompanist, and his sensitivity to nuance and colour allowed him to take great delight in the occasional grand gesture.

He was a Bach enthusiast but also rejoiced in little-known repertoire, particularly music of the 20th century. Here he regularly championed music by a local composer, Ian Parrott, notably the beautiful Elegy and the formidable Toccata, premiered in February 1962, amid the splendour of St John’s College, Cambridge.

As a choral technician he was solid and musicianly, exacting and demanding. Revelling in his rich ecclesiastical surroundings, he directed a small but skilful male choir whose resources he came to use with much imagination and skill.

The catchment area for vocal talent for St Davids Cathedral was small, and in February 1963, while he was preparing for a live broadcast of choral evensong, an influenza outbreak decimated his treble line. Undeterred, he quickly imported ten girls from the secondary school, Ysgol Dewi Sant, who not only saved the day but, in an instant, elevated him to celebrity status.

Boorman referred to the broadcast in his letter to The Times on July 24, 1993: “After the transmission a card arrived from Sir Percy Hull, Organist Emeritus of Hereford, praising the tone of our ‘boys’. He was old, experienced and distinguished, and I fell into none of these categories, so I did not enlighten him. There was no secret, merely the careful choice of high-calibre, musical girls of early secondary school age.”

From then on he made sure, not without occasional controversy, that girls were seamlessly integrated into the fabric of the cathedral’s ministry, and in 1966 he founded a girls’ choir.

High on the list of his achievements at St Davids was the festival that he masterminded in August 1956. Held to mark the tercentenary of the death of the composer Thomas Tomkins, whose father had been organist at the cathedral, the week-long event culminated in the unveiling of the Tomkins Memorial Organ Case. The annual series of summer organ recitals proved equally popular. Boorman also worked for many years with the BBC producer Tregelles Williams, a partnership in which his outstanding musicianship helped to lay the foundations of Songs of Praise.

In 1977 Boorman joined the music department of Bedford School. Later, with his second wife, he retired to Wales. Settling at Llandeloy, the couple renovated a dilapidated vicarage, equipping the music room with a chamber organ. It proved timely, for in his later role as organist emeritus, occasional locum duties brought his rich career a full circle.

In February 1970 Boorman was the subject of a BBC television documentary, Organ Organ, in which the Very Rev T. Edward Jenkins, then Dean of St Davids Cathedral, described him as “a man of many interests, of wide reading and of true culture”.

His first wife predeceased him. He was divorced from his second wife, Susan Meredith Jones, in 1999. He is survived by three children from his first marriage.

Peter Boorman, musician, was born on February 6, 1923. He died on September 27, 2009, aged 86