In some quarters it has now become distinctly unfashionable to even consider recording Bach’s organ music on instruments which don’t have the requisite, ‘historically correct’ Baroque credentials of tracker action, light wind pressures, unequal temperaments and the like. The thought of recording complete Bach recitals on Romantic British cathedral instruments is simply anathema to the purist. I can only hope that this short-sighted point of view will not prevent Bach lovers from exploring the first two volumes of Priory’s new Bach series, the antidote, if you like, to David Goode’s superb ongoing Bach series on the Metzler organ in the chapel of Trinity College Cambridge for Signum.

Chester Cathedral’s Gray and Davidson/Whiteley/Hill organ is a substantial mid-19th-century instrument with a slightly larger stop list than Lincoln’s 1898 Father Willis. Philip Rushworth at Chester favours fairly plain colours for much of his programme. His playing is clean, solid and smooth, with steady and appropriate tempo choices and some lovely light touches, as for example in the opening Prelude in D minor, BWV539, which he gives to a floating, gently wavering flute. The brighter stops are used effectively in the Partita on Ach, was soll ich Sünder machen (BWV770), while the full heft of the tutti choruses packs a mighty punch at the end of a massive build-up in the closing bars of the St Anne Fugue in E flat, complete with 32ft reed.

Both players know their respective instruments better than anyone alive and it is interesting to compare their respective interpretations of the Fantasia and Fugue in G minor (BWV542), the only piece common to both discs. Colin Walsh takes only a few seconds longer than Rushworth, yet his interpretation accentuates much more the architectural edges of this outstandingly original work, with a much stronger sense of the flamboyant in his phrasing and projection of Bach’s melodic lines. Walsh also scores highly for his imaginative sequence of chorale preludes, especially the three treatments of Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, thereby creating a very effective ‘new’ partita. His disc concludes with the mighty Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV582. With the skill of an experienced pilot he gently allows this great leviathan to slip her moorings and to creep out on a contrapuntal odyssey over the Lincolnshire fens. This is Bach-playing of the highest order – and a glorious conclusion to one of the finest Bach organ recordings in recent years.