There are some combinations in the world that simply make sense: eggs and bacon, vanilla ice cream and hot fudge, spinach and garlic. In Irish traditional music, one of those combinations is the fiddle and the uilleann pipes.

The reedy tone and steady drone of the pipes -a bagpipe played sitting down, with a bellows under the piper's arm to keep the bag pressurized - blends perfectly with the music the fiddler's bow and fingers pull from his or her fiddle's four strings.

One of the newer pipes and fiddle duets on today's Irish music scene is that of piper David Power, a native of County Waterford, Ireland, and New Jersey-born fiddler Willie Kelly. Last Friday night, the Shamrock Traditional Irish Music Society (STIMS) brought the duo to Newtown Meeting House.

This was one of the last shows of Mr Power and Mr Kelly's East Coast tour in support of their new CD, Apples in Winter. At the end of the month, they will begin a tour of Ireland, and I feel confident in saying that they can stand side by side with any other traditional act in the homeland of the music.

After an introduction by the Gregg Burnett from STIMS, the concert kicked off with a pair of reels, "The Flax in Bloom" and "Garrett Barry's Reel." Although named for a blind piper from County Clare who died in 1899, the last tune is particularly associated with the late Mike Rafferty. The brilliant flute player from Ballinakil in County Galway was a previous performer at the meeting house, and also a mentor of Mr Kelly's.

"Apples in Winter" and "Scully Casey's" are a lovely pair of jigs, and serve as the title track for the duo's album.

"There are some nice F-naturals in that second one," Mr Power noted, and he was absolutely right.

For the third set of the night, Mr Kelly played two tunes by himself: "Ambrose Moloney's" and "Joe Madden's." The first tune he learned from the late flutist Jack Coen, a native of Woodford, County Galway who, along with his guitarist son Jimmy Coen and his concertina-playing brother Father Charlie Coen, played the first STIMS-sponsored concert at the meeting house, back in October 2001.

For his own first solo piece, Mr Power chose the melody of "Úr-Chnoc Chéin Mhic Céinte" ("The Fresh Hill of Cian Mac Céinte"), one of the classic 18th Century love songs often sung by traditional singers working in the sean nós ("old style").

"I didn't really intend on playing this one tonight," he said, "but it came to me like a vision, so I suppose now I'll have to do it." Everyone in the audience had to be grateful for that vision, and for Mr Power's choice to follow it up with his own version of the long dance "The Ace and Deuce of Piping."

After the break, David Power took out his own fiddle and said "All my life I've been wanting to play the fiddle... and fortunately Willie tolerates me."

It was clear that they had a wonderful time playing classic session tunes on twin fiddles, and it was an equally pleasant surprise when, for the next set, Mr Kelly took out his own set of pipes and the two musicians treated the audience to a set of jigs as a piping duet.

"Both of us like the old sean nós singing," Mr Kelly said as he introduced his solo fiddle take on the melody of the great emigration song "A Stór mo Chroí" ("O Love of my Heart"), "so you'll hear a lot of the in-between notes, as I call them, the notes that are not sharp and not flat but are very expressive... that sometimes gets lost in our modern sensibility with guitar chords and all the rest."

This reviewer has heard this air many times, as both song and instrumental air. Mr Kelly's version, with those in-between notes, is one of the most compelling versions ever encountered.

The concert officially ended with the jigs "Humours of Drinagh" and "Blooming Meadows," but no audience could bear to see such a show end without demanding an encore. And so, after a final blast of reels, all left the meeting house.