Is this the start of a recording age when non-organists are being challenged to hear Bach’s organ music afresh? Robert Quinney’s new series (Coro, 1/12, A/13) would suggest so, and hard on its heels we have an enterprising juxtaposition of the composer’s bold transcriptions of five concertos by Prince Johann Ernst and Vivaldi with generally more introspective chorale preludes, including the intensely crafted and incrementally impressive Variations (or Partita) on Sei gegrüsset.

Kåre Nordstoga is an altogether more conventional player than Quinney, more concerned with an evenly abstract musical impact than rhetorical questing or surprises. To a certain degree, that is always likely to manifest itself in the concertos, whose rationales – both self-didactic in the case of Vivaldi and politically pragmatic for his Prince employer (one imagines) – require a steady hand at the tiller.

The Grosso Mogul (BWV594) sounds a touch unwieldy on the Silbermann in Arlesheim Cathedral (the pedal often uncomfortably late in reaching the microphone) but the slow movement captures a distant flavour of its intended exotica, and the beguiling Largo e spiccato of the D minor work (BWV596) does this even more effectively. The full-blooded A minor Concerto from Vivaldi’s L’estro armonico (BWV593) brings the best out of the organ and Nordstoga in this genre, and one can revel here in Bach’s nonchalantly adept arranging techniques.

Yet this is nothing to the landscape in the second CD, where registration and musical decisions in Sei gegrüsset and an agreeable programme of chorale preludes reveal more about Nordstoga’s Bachian credentials. Of the former, there is something breathtakingly poignant about the raw materials, notwithstanding the self-conscious care Bach took in crafting and reworking the variations.

Nordstoga may not offer the highly wrought alchemy of Karl Richter’s knotty live performance from Magadino in 1965 (Aura Classics) but he delivers a calculated and dignified procession of movements; the registrations are often mesmerising (take the gorgeous fluidity of Var 6 with its soft flutes) and they move with sublime conviction towards an epic, valedictory close. Of the chorale preludes, nothing quite tops this. Yet one is left wondering why so many of these great Bach vignettes are still relatively obscure within the oeuvre. Nordstoga is a compelling advocate.