As time goes on, Helmuth Rilling and the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart's achievement only grows in stature, especially now that Teldec's Bach Edition has vanished into Warner's...

As time goes on, Helmuth Rilling and the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart's achievement only grows in stature, especially now that Teldec's Bach Edition has vanished into Warner's heedless maw. In particular, Rilling's unaffectedly musical, period-performance-influenced but undogmatic approach seems designed to sustain long-term listener satisfaction. He's so strong in the basic qualities that matter most. For example, he has the best soloists of any major series of Bach vocal works--names like Arlene Auger, Juliane Banse, Matthias Goerne, Christophe Prégardien, Christine Schäfer--the list reads like a "who's who" of major late-20th-century singers. The choral singing also is uniformly superb.

Instrumental soloists are no less distinguished: Trevor Pinnock, Robert Levin, Evgeni Koroliev, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, and many others. As an instrumental conductor, Rilling isn't as overtly flashy as you'll find with some of the trendier period-instrument groups, but his mastery of Bach's idiom is never in doubt, and while you can perhaps do better in individual works (including Rilling's own last version of the B minor Mass), I can say with complete conviction that nothing here is less than very good as either performance or sound. In terms of sheer consistency the quality here is astonishing, and in terms of value for dollar this is unbeatable.

The 172 CDs come packaged with a CD-ROM containing all notes and texts (more than 5,000 pages). Certainly this is one of the great achievements in the history of recordings, and it's very satisfying to see that the Hänssler team understands the value of what it has done, and takes pride in the accomplishment. If you want the complete Bach, this is the obvious choice.

– David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Details:
- Dimensions: approx. 41 x 14,5 x 14,5 cm
- Weight: approx. 4 kg
- 1 CD Rom as an E-book with 5.000 pages, including all song texts, introductions, biographical notes in German, English, French and Spanish, and a search function for looking into the texts, paging and marking throughout
- 2 books with BWV- (288 pages) and CD- (144 pages) number listing and additional information (12,5 cm x 12,5 cm)