This is a DG Original long overdue. Drawing mainly on four solo Bach recordings from 1964 to ’69 (of which only a few examples have previously emerged on CD in budget compilations), Karl Richter’s thrilling advocacy of Bach is heard in new crystal-clear, evergreen dimensions. In the midst of a prolific conducting career in Munich, Richter maintained his harpsichord- and organ-playing to an extraordinarily high standard but it was the latter that truly fired his imagination for colour, architecture and pure chutzpah as a soloist. How compellingly this nonchalant virtuoso builds up vibrancy in the rapier Fugue of BWV532, creates momentum of such elastic grandeur in the Toccata of BWV540 that one is left both ecstatic and wrung out, and brings a rare, visionary zeal to the great St Anne Prelude and Fugue, BWV552.

Most engaging about Richter – as in his best choral and instrumental work – is his burning intensity and questing musicianship which sadly became more elusive as he moved towards his untimely death, at little over 50 in 1981. Indeed, the Freiburg Cathedral recordings from 1978 are generally the least satisfying in this three-CD set.

Yet, for the most part, the playing here reveals him at the height of his powers. The trio sonatas (the kind of pieces where registration priorities have changed so radically as usually to render superfluous older performances) are light, intimate and deeply cultivated in their gestural, courtly provenance. Likewise, the big preludes, toccatas and fugues are lean and dynamic in their quixotic shift between fanfaric lift and legato line, always headed towards a point of dramatic or rhetorical denouement.

Such an approach to Bach organ performance probably resonates more these days than in the 1960s where historical ‘veracity’ conspired to deaden much of the potential interest in Bach’s organ music. Musical decisions always held sway over historical dogma for Richter but his choice of the appropriately responsive Marcussen instrument (from the Jaegersborg Church in Copenhagen) exhibits an especially riveting and dynamic application of performance practice to suit his own kaleidoscopic feeling for Bach’s imagination beyond the organ loft. Only the rather austere cadences seem excessive to our ears now.

Here, then, are Bach performances for a larger community than that of the organ aficionado; for those who relish the strange alchemy of tradition, risk and the forgotten fruits of a uniquely dynamic personality of his time.