Bach Complete Organ Works - Hans Fagius BIS

Oh Bach & baroque keyboard Experts - What's the critical consensus on this set?.... available at a very reasonable price in my local HMV. Thanks in advance.

 

The Fagius cycle has been released by Brilliant Classics too. As well as an individual set as part of Brilliants complete Bach set. Maybe the individual set is cheaper than the BIS set, I don't know. (see below)
By the way a cycle from the early HIP days in the 1980es, played on restored Swedish baroque organs, an authoritive, brilliant and beautiful reading, not as individual as the Wolfgang Rübsam Philips cycle or the Gerhard Weinberger CPO cycle (the latter not fully complete yet), but still well worth to listen repeatedly to, and very complete as to choice of works (includes even some definitely not authentic but fine works), and the organs are very well recorded as is the rule with BIS. I am very happy to own the cycle, even if I own some other cycles too. Indeed I find only four cycles to be more generally satisfying then the Fagius cycle, and these are the first Rübsam cycle (Philips 1977), the two latest Alain cycles (Erato 1980 and 1990es) and the actually ongoing and almost complete Weinberger cycle (CPO). My conclusion is, that the Fagius cycle is well worth to own even at full price, and if you can get it cheaper, as you can, then buy it. But look first for the price of the individual Brilliant set, which ought to be rather cheap.

 

The Brilliant box with the Fagius Bach cycle (17 CDs) is availabe by www.jpc.de for 34 Euros.

 

Well - I've bought the BIS set anyway, £25 UK, comes on only 5 discs! SACDs - each over 4 hours of music on them. Unfortunately it makes it inaccesible for some, but not for me!
Got it this afternoon on way home from work, played the Passacaglia and Fugue - a particular favourite especially orchestrations by Stokowski and Respighi - as soon as I got in. Very very satisfying indeed.

 

Yes, it is very satisfying, expect that I don't like the unpleasant sound of that organ in Kristine Church, Falun, which more or less ruins four discs. The Leufsta Bruk Cahman organ is terrific. The Wahlberg organ is also good.

 

This may not be true for the Bach Organ but I have some BIS disks that are duplicated on Brilliant. The latter suffers from a much thinner reproduction so if quality is an issue stay with BIS.

 

So have I, but I haven't noted any substantial difference. I shall give them a comparative try again.

 

Free programs probably exist that make it possible to compare two discs and check out if they are identical.

 

Yes, maybe, but if I can't hear the difference, I don't care a damn.