Hans Fagius - J.S. Bach: The Complete Organ Works, Part 2 (9CD) (1987)

The Fagius Bach recordings are well known by now, having been issued by BIS one CD at a time in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently licensed and compiled by Brilliant Classics. You’d expect the Brilliant CD to be a bargain, but get this: Brilliant offers 18 hours of music on 17 discs for about $75, whereas this BIS box offers 20 hours of music (it adds The Art of the Fugue and some other material) on five discs for only $35. BIS only half-jokingly suggests that you take the money you save and invest it in an SACD player if you don’t already have one, and you’ll still come out ahead. That’s certainly true compared to buying the individual BIS discs. One drawback to the packaging, I must say, is that the one-and-an-eighth-inch-wide box is nearly as wide as that for Peter Hurford’s excellent 17-disc Decca set (an import now retailing for more than $200). With Fagius, you’ll save a lot of money, but not much shelf space.

I doubt that many people will listen to any one of these four-hour discs straight through, but in case you’re so inclined, the music is laid out for maximum variety, mixing fugues with chorales with trio sonatas, except where big collections ( Art of the Fugue , the Orgelbüchlein ) are kept together. A thick booklet contains track listings, good and extensive notes by Fagius in the usual three languages, and an index of each piece by BWV number with a reference to the disc that holds it. A second booklet, a beautifully illustrated fold-out, contains photos and information for each of the six organs (some Baroque, some contemporary) employed in this cycle.

And the performances? I’ll draw a good summary of the whole set from Michael Carter’s praise for The Art of the Fugue , when he inducted it into the Classical Hall of Fame in Fanfare: “Fagius is an exceptionally gifted performer and his cycle of the Bach organ works for Robert von Bahr and BIS is both respected and envied in the music world. Eschewing idiosyncrasies, Fagius offers us a cleanly articulated but never antiseptic version of Art of the Fugue . The registrations were selected to accentuate the nature and peculiarity of each of the contrapuncti and simultaneously offer the auditor a listening experience in which each voice is clearly audible and never muddied by another contrapuntal line.” Little more needs to be said, aside from urging you to acquire this fine-sounding bargain box—if you have the proper playback equipment. -- James Reel