Beecham’s adage that ‘a musicologist is a man who can read music but can’t hear it’ needs to be revised, based on the evidence of these two completions of incomplete organ pieces and a pair of arrangements of solo violin works by Bach. For Thomas Meyer-Fiebig (b1949), professor of composition at Tokyo’s Kunitachi College of Music, these were not mere academic exercises but a chance to enter into another composer’s mind-set.

Just a dozen bars survive of the opening of the Fantasia in C, BWV573. Taking as his model the Preludes in C minor, BWV546, and E minor, BWV548, Meyer-Fiebig spins the given material into a movement lasting just over eight and a half minutes. As a pasticheur he makes a convincing case. More help was to hand in the Fantasia and Fugue in C minor, BWV562, probably an early Weimar work, cut short after 27 bars of the five-voice fugue. Since Bach was working out a double fugue, the challenge was to create a second subject with sufficient contrapuntal ‘legs’ to be combinable with Bach’s own main theme. This masterful solution is an artistic triumph.

While the Solo Violin Sonata is fleshed out into an imposing four-movement concerto, the 64 variations of the Chaconne are projected through a 15-minute span of quasi-Romantic rhetoric. The 80-rank Jehmlich organ in Dresden’s Evangelical Church sings forcefully into a swimmy acoustic, though Aya Yoshida’s clean and crisp articulation ensures that little important detail is lost. Fascinating.