The ‘experts’ celebrated here by French baroque Ensemble Les Surprises under keyboardist-conductor Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas are two musical family dynasties whose constant innovations in their respective domains made for inseparably linked histories: the Bachs, and the keyboard-building Silbermanns, whose instruments the Bachs knew, appreciated and gave feedback on. Programming-wise, the attempt has been first to ‘conjure up the musical ferment that reigned in the Bach family’s life in Leipzig from the 1730s onwards, with its musical sparring matches, its morning prayers and its instrumental virtuosity’; and secondly to chart how Johann Sebastian’s successors – represented here by his sons Wilhelm Friedemann (1710 84) and Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714 88) – developed their own new musical languages while simultaneously retaining their father-teacher’s influence. The Silbermanns provide now, as they did then, the instrument-shaped paintbox with which to do this: an anonymous 18th-century harpsichord (Jonte Knife and Arno Pelto, Helsinki 2002), a fortepiano after Gottfried Silbermann (Andrea Restelli, Milan 2014), and the magnificent 1714 Gottfried Silbermann organ at the Cathedral of St Mary in Freiberg, Saxony; and when any programme designed to show off all the above is going to represent a proper cornucopia of musical styles, genres, textures and timbres, that’s precisely what we have, with its multifarious keyboard works, trio sonatas, lieder and arias.

An early highlight is the fabulously sparky sparring between musicians and instrument textures that is Bestion de Camboulas and Clément Geoffroy over CPE Bach’s Duett in E flat, H613, for harpsichord and fortepiano. No less striking is the suaver superglued buoyancy with which Johann Sebastian’s Trio Sonata No 3 in D minor, BWV527, is dispatched, Geoffroy still at the harpsichord, and everyone audibly enjoying both each other and the drama embedded within its Andante’s harmonic language; and this trio’s listening pleasures continue with how well its Adagio e dolce sounds in the faint, woody bloom afforded by the Châtellerault Théâtre Blossac stage, and the peppiness of the strings’ curved inflections in the concluding Vivace’s tumbling passagework. And while you don’t technically need to be drawing cross-generational musicological connections to relish what you’re hearing, such a performance means that BWV527 is very much still in your consciousness when later it’s mirrored in the energetically tumbling fortepiano figures of CPE Bach’s Keyboard Trio in E minor, H531.

The organ doesn’t appear until track 8 – JS Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in C minor, BWV562 – and is all the more impactful for the wait, Bestion de Camboulas exploiting its wide palette with vital expressivity. An even greater demonstration of its many characters, though, is the later Bach sandwich where two Wilhelm Friedemann works – his ethereal treble Preludio in C minor and his more severe Fantasie in D minor – frame CPE Bach’s lyrical organ transcription of their father’s chorale Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ. Add Marc Mauillon’s crisply articulated, bright-toned vocals and this is a colourfully – expertly – conceived, superbly executed project, which I rather hope they’ll produce a sequel to.