There are also two booklets: one is a full catalogue of the set, by disc, with track-listings this runs to nearly 300 pages. The discs are therefore easy to find and choose from the box. The CDs have colour coding for the different types of works (cantatas, sacred music, organ, keyboard, instrumental), and each bears a large volume number and a title. Each CD is in a paper and glassine sleeve, and is well labelled. It's a big box, sleek and well-designed, and, as you can see in the illustration to this review, opens to show the CDs in three sections.
Let's start by looking at what you get in the box. The set is currently available for around $300 in the US, less than £200 in the UK, and around €225 elsewhere in the EU. Hänssler has now re-issued this set in a space-saving box at a 'nice' price, or €299.
After releasing them individually, they then sold a box set, at what was then considered a normal price, but since the advent of Brilliant Classics pricing, seemed expensive. They enlisted Rilling to oversee the set, and came up with a wonderful collection of 172 CDs in 140 volumes (a number of the volumes contain 2 or 3 discs). At first, Hänssler set out to fill out their Bach recordings, which were built around Helmuth Rilling's set of the sacred cantatas. This brings me to the subject at hand:, the Hänssler set of Bach recordings, which the label organized around 2000, during the celebrations for the 250th anniversary of Bach's death. While I initially felt the cantata recordings to be good, more recent recordings (by Gardiner, Suzuki and others) have put them near the back of the pack. This is a mixed bag, with some excellent recordings, but quite a few mediocre discs. In fact, the first big Brilliant Classics box I got was their set of Bach recordings, released back in 2001. I've long been a fan of the latter approach, especially since Brilliant Classics has shaken up the classical music business with their very low priced box sets of complete (or collected) works of various composers. Or you could buy a complete set of Bach's music, offering you the ability to sample all of this great composer's works, then, if you find affinities with specific works and want to seek out other versions, do so. You could buy individual CDs, filling your collection slowly, looking for the best versions of each work. This Bach-itis has led me to collect more than 1,000 discs of Bach, and, while I've slowed down on purchases in recent years, I do pick up some new Bach recordings every now and then, notably the recently concluded set of cantatas recorded by John Eliot Gardiner (review).īut do you really need all this music? Perhaps you're a casual fan of Bach's music and you want more. Do you need 172 CDs of Bach's music? Well, some of us do some of us need even more.
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