Product Description
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Globally recognized as the only authoritative edition of Bach's
works celebrating a lifetime's work and sought-after throughout
the world. Hanssler Classic's Edition Backakademie set the
standard for Bach interpretation! After tens of thousands of
copies of the original box set sold globally, Hanssler Classic
makes the epic Bach Edition available once again completely
redesigned, streamlined and updated and Includes 172 CDs in black
paper sleeves, in a very attractive, elegant looking, light and
handy box a 5000 pages text material on CD-ROM and two books with
BWV and CD number listing.
Review
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Do you need 172 CDs of Bach's music? Well, some of us do; some
of us need even more. 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 s
every now and then, notably the recently concluded set of
cantatas recorded by John Eliot Gardiner (review). But do you
really need all this music? Perhaps you're a casual fan of Bach's
music and you want more. You could buy individual CDs, filling
your collection slowly, looking for the best versions of each
work. This is time-consuming and expensive. 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.
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. In fact, the first big Brilliant
Classics box I got was their set of Bach s, released
back in 2001. (review). This is a mixed bag, with some excellent
s, but quite a few mediocre discs. While I initially
felt the cantata s to be good, more recent s
(by Gardiner, Suzuki and others) have put them near the back of
the pack. This brings me to the subject at hand:, the Hänssler
set of Bach s, which the label organized around 2000,
during the celebrations for the 250th anniversary of Bach's
death. At first, Hänssler set out to fill out their Bach
s, which were built around Helmuth Rilling's set of the
sacred cantatas. 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). 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. Hänssler has now re-issued
this set in a space-saving box at a "nice" price, or 299. The set
is currently available for around $300 in the US, less than £200
in the UK, and around 225 elsewhere in the EU. Let's start by
looking at what you get in the box. 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. Each CD is in a
paper and glassine sleeve, and is well labelled. 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. The discs are therefore easy to find
and choose from the box. 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 second is an index by BWV number,
which then points you to specific discs. Finally, there is a
CD-ROM with complete texts of the vocal music, extensive notes
and detailed track and artist information. These are provided in
14 PDF files that you can view on any computer. They contain the
full notes that you would expect to receive with CDs, in German,
English, French and Spanish, and total some 5,000 CD-sized pages.
Hänssler has clearly not scrimped on the documentation, and one
should actually expect this with any big box set. In reality such
high-quality documentation is, alas, rare. There are nearly 178
hours of music in this box, which is a daunting prospect for
anyone. Even fans of Bach will find some works that don't
interest them much - perhaps the eight discs of chorale settings,
which have not been recorded often, yet contain some gems - but
choosing either to traverse the set in order, or at random,
yields many excellent s. Back in 2000, during the
wonderful Bach year, I bought a number of the individual Hänssler
discs to fill out my collection. This was in part because, at the
time, there were not a lot of choices for some of the less common
works, but also because of the excellent quality of these
s. I notably purchased many of the keyboard s,
and some of them have become my favourites. I'd note especially
Trevor Pinnock's superlative of the Partitas; Peter
Watchorn's great Toccatas disc; and the Well-Tempered Clavier
recorded by Robert Levin in a unique manner, with different works
played on harpsichord, clavichord, organ and fortepiano.
Naturally, at nearly one-third of the box, the sacred cantatas
are form the biggest chunk here. They are arguably Bach's finest
works, together with the secular cantatas (eight discs) and the
other sacred vocal works (passions, masses, motets and oratorios)
which cover 16 discs. This is where this box is simply a bargain.
Helmuth Rilling is an excellent conductor and interpreter of
Bach's sacred music. While I have a preference for John Eliot
Gardiner's cantata s, because of his forces and his more
HIP choices, there is no doubt that Rilling's s are
excellent. Recorded from 1969 to 1985, over a longer period of
time than most other sets, there is a lot of change throughout
the series. Rilling's s are more dense and lush than
others, and his tempi are often slower than HIP s - no
"original instruments" for Rilling. But he creates such a
detailed sound-world that any fan of these works should want to
hear Rilling's versions to compare with others. This said,
Rilling often uses a technique that I find a bit disturbing.
He'll have one instrument or group of instruments sequestered to
one track, and others on the other track, giving a sound similar
to that of early Beatles' stereo mixes, where vocals were on one
track and instruments on the other. This is something you never
hear in live performance; while one instrument may be on one
side, you still hear it on the other side. This tends to make
some of the movements sound as though there's no blend among the
singers and musicians. It's worth noting that, in some cases,
re-takes were made months after initial s of some
movements of the cantatas, and the sound can vary from one part
of a cantata to another. But this doesn't detract from the
overall tone. One more point: the actual quality of
these works varies, and is generally not as clean as that of more
recent cantata s using newer technology. While this is a
minor detail, it can be obvious if you compare different
s of a given cantata. Rilling notably has an excellent
collection of singers in the sacred works. To name but a few that
stand out: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Arleen Augér, Helen Watts,
Edith Wiens, Peter Schreier, Philipp Huttenlocher, Matthias
Goerne, Juliane Banse, Thomas Quasthoff, Christoph Prégardien and
many more. And Rilling's choirs are always top-notch. The same
can be said for the other sacred works, the passions, oratorios
and masses. So far I've barely scratched the surface, even though
the sacred vocal works are the heart of the collection. The organ
works fill 20 CDs, the keyboard works 32, 11 discs of chamber
music, 11 discs of orchestral music, and 4 discs of alternate
versions of cantatas. There's a very attractive of the
Musical Offering, on a variety of instruments: fortepiano,
harpsichord, viola da gamba, flute and violin. Robert Hill's
of The Art of Fugue on harpsichord is brilliant, and
includes early versions of some of the fugues; the notes explain
the different versions, and tell you how you can program the
tracks in such a way as to listen to the two different versions
of the work. One disc contains reconstructed violin concertos
performed by Isabelle Faust. Another fine , again by
Robert Hill, shows off the rarely recorded lute-harpsichord.
Hille Perl and Michael Beringer play the sonatas for viola da
gamba and harpsichord. And the Oregon Bach Festival Chamber
Orchestra, led by Helmuth Rilling, plays the Brandenburg
Concertos and Orchestral Suites; certainly not my favourite
versions, but fine ones nevertheless. One of the only elements I
find missing is versions of The Art of Fugue for organ and for
chamber orchestra. Some criticisms are in order, though. Boris
Pergamenschikow's cello suites are ponderous; Dmitry
Sitkovetsky's solo violin s are a bit better, but not up
to the competition. These are two of my favourite groups of
Bach's works, and I turn to other s when I want to
listen to them. The organ works are performed by seven different
organists, playing in different locations. Organ s often
try to vary their sound by using different organs, and the sound
is different from one to another, as is the style. In some ways I
would have preferred a single organist, even at different
locations, but this isn't a deal-breaker. So, back to my initial
question: do you need this set? It depends on how Bach-obsessed
you are. If you're familiar with Rilling's cantata s,
and appreciate them, then this set is worth getting if only for
those discs - which do make up more than a third of the set. If
you have a lot of Bach and want more, then the answer is obvious.
And if you don't have a lot of Bach, and want to discover all of
his works in s that range from very good to excellent
you can't go wrong. Comparing this set to the Brilliant Classics
box, I would certainly give higher grades to Hänssler. It is more
expensive, but I think it's a much more worthwhile investment
than the more uneven Brilliant Classics set. No matter what, at
about $1.50, £1 or 1.30 a disc, if you care about Bach enough to
want this much music, you owe it to yourself to get this set. Add
it to your Christmas list, perhaps, or buy yourself a present. --
MusicWeb International, Kirk McElhearn, November 2010
