1723. Are you racking your brains as to what exactly happened 300 years ago that was worthy of an album-shaped celebration from The English Concert’s leader Nadja Zwiener and Leipzig Thomaskirche organist Johannes Lang? Well, this was the year of JS Bach’s investiture as Leipzig Cantor, and also the construction year of the instruments Zwiener and Lang play. Under Lang’s fingers and toes is the single-manual, 14-stop beauty created for the village church of Störmthal near Leipzig by a young Zacharias Hildebrandt, fresh out of his training with master organ builder Gottfried Silbermann – an organ of such outstanding timbral range and tonal beauty that an impressed Bach composed a new cantata for its inaugural service; 2008 saw it restored to its historical state. As for Zwiener’s violin, this was made in Rome by David Tecchler, whose mostly Cremonese-inspired instruments also drew to a lesser extent on those of Jacob Stainer, one of whose instruments Bach appears to have owned. Put those two instruments together in repertoire demonstrating Bach’s interest in the music of his near and further-flung contemporaries and predecessors, and in conceptual terms alone, ‘1723’ is both a beguiling and a neatly resonant concept.

Most importantly, though, it sounds great. The recording is very lovely for starters – woodily warm, perching us right up alongside them in the organ loft, just close enough to get Lang’s softly dancing feet and the tactile movement of Zwiener’s strings. This modest-size organ boasts a strikingly attractive tone and a tremendous range of colours. For a bijou-size demonstration of its bell-like high treble sweetness, head to their lighter-than-air reading of the second Allegro of Corelli’s Sonata in A, Op 5 No 6. Then, for colouristic range, it has to be Lang’s radiantly flowing reading of Bach’s Prelude, Largo and Fugue in C, BWV545 – heard here in its three-movement version incorporating the Largo from the Trio Sonata in C, BWV529, which Lang has in turn arranged to incorporate Zwiener’s violin – where each multicoloured movement is painted in a new, dramatically potent overall shade.

Zwiener’s own fine struttings of her and her instrument’s stuff include her intricately thought-through switches of timbre and articulation over Biber’s Violin Sonata in E minor. It’s impossible to say which instrument is best showcased by Bertali’s crazy Ciaccona in C, but either way its tightly interwoven, increasingly ornate counterpoint is every bit the joyous album climax one would hope for in the context of what has already been enjoyed, Zwiener and Lang demonstrating just how far in each other’s pockets they are. Essentially, whether a Baroque violin-and organ recital fits with your usual predilections or not, you should give this a spin.