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If I were writing a two-word review, I'd simply say 'rather nice'. However, you may need to know that Eduard Franck was born in Breslau in 1817 and died in 1893. A highly regarded pianist and a respected teacher, Franck was the son of a cultureloving banker. Thanks to his father's wealth, Franck was exposed to the highest forms of art and he was also able to study in Leipzig with Mendelssohn, which is very apparent in these particular pieces. Schubert may also be thought another strong influence; and there's always Mozart in terms of Franck's clarity of composition.

Of Franck's string-based chamber music, there are two quintets (both with two violas and thus a further connection to Mozart). They are happily collected here. Each is roughly 35 minutes in duration, each has four movements in a conventional layout and both are well worth getting to know. Neither work quite reaches the genius of the aforementioned composers, yet each is very enjoyable, very listenable and with much to return to. The earlier of the works begins in wistful fashion and with a sense of purpose, the lively Allegro writing engaging through delightful rhythmic élan and lovely melodies. The scherzo includes unexpected use of pizzicato; the slow movement is song-like; and an exuberant finale caps a youthful opus of elegant craftsmanship.

The C major Quintet has darker seams and can be troubled in its emotion. The slow movement is rather anguished, to which the dance-like Minuet (rather than a scherzo) is a charming foil. The only cause for doubt is a rather strenuous set of variations that act as the finale; there isn't quite the level of inspiration here that enlightens the first three movements or indeed the whole of the earlier work.

The performances are excellent, notable for the musicians' individual excellence and their intelligent interaction. If the chosen acoustic is slightly too spacious and a little edgy, the players fill the space with well-prepared performances that leave no doubt as to their belief in this music. Indeed, these two pieces should find many friends.

Arthur Campbell and Helen Marlais are husband and wife and both are on the teaching faculty at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This CD was recorded north of the border, however, in Alberta, and in two sessions, together spanning exactly six years. As the present release is identified as the first volume in a projected series, one hopes that future volumes will not be released at Six-year intervals!

Representing German, French and British composers, and a period of 113 years, this programme offers many opportunities for the performers to point up the contrasts between these works, as well as the ways in which they resemble each other. If there is a fault with this generally fine release, it is that Campbell and Marlais do not do this as much as they might. Overall, while the playing is at a very high level in terms of technique, it is a little muted emotionally.

Take, for example, Schumann's three Fantasiestücke. These are terrific pieces, full of melancholy (the first), fancy (the second) and passion (the third). Performers should not hesitate to make Schumann's highs very high and his lows very low; I think there is more risk in underplaying his music than in overplaying it. Campbell and Marlais, perhaps in fear of exaggerating, mute the emotional extremes in these pieces. The result is very 'proper' but I would argue that such reserve goes against the grain of the music. A quick listen to Reginald Kell reveals almost identical tempos in the first two pieces (he is quite a bit faster – correctly so, I think – in the third), but a very different sound and approach throughout. Kell's brighter sound, with more 'ping' and vibrato, draws back the curtain and reveals that this music is not quite, well … normal. On the other hand, Marlais is a more positive piano partner than the one assigned to Kell.

Two years earlier, Kell also recorded Debussy’s Première Rapsodie – like Campbell, in the version for clarinet and piano. Kell and Campbell both finish the piece in a few seconds over eight minutes, yet there is a world of difference in how they get from Point A to Point B. Again, Kell's sound is more forward and exciting. This is partly due to the recording, hiss be damned. (Audite's engineering is velvety and balanced.) Much of it is due to Kell, himself, however, who moulded the sound of his clarinet the way that the best singers do with their voices. Kell and Rosen are more spontaneous than Campbell and Marlais, whose reading, with everything in its place, reminds us that Debussy composed the Rapsodie as a test piece. Turning to a British player with a wonderfully French name, Gervase de Peyer is a little more controlled (or should I say 'controlling'?) than Kell, but he too, when compared to Campbell, has a more enlivening flicker in his sound and in his interpretation. Last but not least, Martin Fröst's reading combines Campbell's straightahead tone with a more emotionally volatile response to the music.

These differences, generally speaking, also extend to the sonatas by Saint-Saëns and Poulenc – all cornerstones of the repertory, Campbell and Marlais seem best suited to the former, a work which exudes rectitude and comfortable propriety. (In the last movement, Saint-Saëns does run a little wild, as he had a tendency to do in his last movements!) Here, the evenness of Campbell's tone production is an asset. On the other hand, Campbell and Marlais don't have as much fun as the other performers do with Poulenc's often cheeky and even outrageous sonata. It is interesting that both of these sonatas came from the very end of each composer's life, yet there is little stock-taking or navel-gazing in either of them!

Malcolm Arnold's Sonatina, even more than Poulenc's Sonata, was made for fun. Surprisingly, Campbell and Marlais are even more explosive here than de Peyer and Pryor, yet the latter pair capture a mocking quality in the outer movements that eludes the present performers.

The booklet notes are interesting. I did not know, for example, that Colin Davis started his musical career as a clarinettist, and that he premiered Arnold's Sonatina.

I don't want to make too much of my negative comments. By most measures, this is an admirable CD, and if the combination of works is appealing, then don't hesitate. Do, however, treat yourself to some of the alternatives, in the individual works that appeal to you most.

William Thomas Best presided for almost 40 years at the large Willis organ in St George's Hall, Liverpool, where he helped to define the role of the civic organist in Britain by playing weekly recitals and developing a repertory of 'straight' organ music and transcriptions of works originally composed for other instruments. His enthusiasm for Bach was evangelical. He is reputed to have been willing to play on request any of Bach's organ works in his Saturday recital, given notice by the preceding Thursday. He also made a complete edition, from which most of the works on this disc are played.

Anyone expecting Best's Bach to be the organ equivalent of Leopold Stokowski's phantasmagorical orchestrations may be surprised. His editions aren't scholarly in the modern sense, but Best was a careful, even sensitive editor, resulting in performances that are often fairly modest and restrained rather than extravagant. Of course, they are overlaid with the interpretative values of the day, and it's in these details – the registration, articulation and tempos, for example – that the interest lies.

The chorale preludes can sound quite lean. In Liebster Jesu and Herzlich tut mich verlangen there is less rather than more ornamentation of the melody to be relished – it all sounds a little plain, in fact – and the former is taken much faster than it is usually played nowadays. Elsewhere, too, less often does seem to mean more for Best. The great Passacaglia is played not with organo pleno throughout but as a series of differently coloured, often delicate variations that, to Best at least, must have seemed the most effective way to elucidate the work's structure. This is much the same approach as in his well-known arrangement of the Chaconne in D minor, originally for violin, which in this context now appears less a oneoff piece of showmanship than a serious study of musical form.

Best's interpretations transform familiar works in a way that can sound strange to modern ears. To hear the Passacaglia and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor fading away on soft flue stops is very odd indeed, the unexpected, quiet endings becoming a means of dissipating the preceding fugal tensions rather than fulfilling their more familiar climactic function. The 'little' Prelude and Fugue in E minor too is quite understated, its fugue turned into a meditative afterthought for flutes and undulating strings.

Unless listening with Best's editions to hand, it will sometimes be difficult to disentangle the interpretational input of editor and performer. Carsten Wiebusch follows most of Best's suggestions to a T, but I detect a few (minor) departures from the score. He ignores the different flat and natural upper notes of the long trills in the fugue of the Toccata and Fugue and some of his tempos don't match Best's recommended metronome marks. Best doesn't articulate the usually swinging 6/8 fugue subject of the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue as if in 3/4, but that's how Wiebusch plays it, and the result is square and awkward.

Wiebusch pre-empts criticism of his choice of instrument by citing Best's interpretative freedom as justification: he sees it as no disadvantage that the Klais organ of the Christuskirche, Karlsruhe, has a tautness and tang to its tonal qualities that are a world away from the luscious, orchestrally conceived town hall organ Best played. He seeks authenticity in Best's ideas rather than in trying to reproduce more precisely Best's sound, which he argues does not lie at the heart of the matter. I'm sure there are those who would disagree, given that Best's ideas must have been informed at least in part by the type of organ he played. Some of the differences are regrettable, such as the Clarinet solo in the Adagio of the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue, which is assigned to a rather thin-lipped reed with mutation overtones in the absence of a nice rounded orchestral clarinet. Nevertheless, putting aside tricky questions of authenticity, the Klais is a fine, enjoyable instrument with some lovely, freshsounding voices, and it is very well recorded.

This is a curious disc. While I'm intrigued to hear Best's take on Bach (or should that be Wiebusch's take on Best), neither the instrument nor the arguments in its favour really win me over, and I'm left wondering how close to Best this recording really brings us.

Karl Ristenpart's recordings of a dozen or so of Bach's cantatas, dating from the late 1950s and early to mid-1960s, are probably well known to lovers of the repertoire. The contents of this box, by contrast, will be familiar only to radio-listening readers who were living in Germany in the years immediately following the Second World War. Although Ristenpart managed to record just about a third of Bach's cantatas between 1947 and 1952, thus running concurrently with Günther Ramin's radio recordings with the Leipzig Thomanerchor (Berlin Classics), his aim to record them all was never realized, owing to a change in management at the broadcasting station RIAS Berlin. The whole sorry story is lucidly related by Habakuk Traber in an informative booklet essay.

Meanwhile, we must be grateful for the 29 cantatas, albeit one of which is by Telemann, which have been preserved and now most skilfully transferred to CD from the original analogue tapes, rather than 78rpm records. Listening to them has been a veritable epiphany, for not only did Ristenpart clearly have ideas well ahead of his time but also the discernment to engage what were probably the two finest German Bach Singers available to him. These are the late Helmut Krebs and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, not forgetting a very young Agnes Giebel. Krebs sings in all the cantatas requiring tenor voice, Fischer-Dieskau in comfortably over half of those containing recitatives and arias for bass.

Though I well remember an icy-cold day on a railway station platform in Berlin-Dahlem in 1977, when Krebs told me about these recordings, he never intimated that any of them were still in existence. I assumed they were not, and so this box of treasures has been affording particular delight, both for its element of surprise but, above all, for the pleasure generated by the imaginative and individual musicianship of Ristenpart, his soloists and instrumentalists.

Compared with those of Karl Richter and Fritz Werner, Ristenpart's choir is small, bringing with it effective degrees of lucidity and athleticism. The vocal diction is enunciated with clarity by choir and soloists alike, a feature by which Ristenpart evidently set some store. Internal balance is well maintained for the most part and it soon becomes apparent that textural transparency in which instruments and voices are allowed to converse without having to compete was of prime consideration. All this is par for the course nowadays, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s it comes as something of a surprise to hear such a light-footed, chambermusic approach to Bach. With only one or two exceptions Ristenpart favours brisk tempos; indeed his Christ lag in Todesbanden (BWV 4) knocks a full half-minute off Masaaki Suzuki's (BIS).

It is inevitable that in a sizeable clutch of cantatas such as this not everything will come across uniformly well – the clipped articulation of the voices in some of the choruses is dated, though in Ristenpart's hands by no means inexpressive, as you can hear in the opening chorale fantasia of Herr Jesu Christ, wahr' Mensch und Gott (BWV 127). It is a pity, too, that occasionally da capos are shortened, but such instances are exceptions rather than the rule. Any other lapses are few and far between, often, I suspect, deriving as much from the limitations of recording technique as from any shortcomings in the artists themselves.

It is wonderful to hear Krebs in his prime. Seldom do we encounter recitatives sung with such urgent communication and such poetry as he had at his command, though just occasionally even he sounds uneven, as in the exacting tenor aria of Es ist euch gut, dass ich hingehe (BWV 108). In this lyrical piece it is Peter Pears who has the edge in an early recording with Karl Richter (Teldec-Warner). The youthful Fischer-Dieskau likewise seldom disappoints and then only with a hint of excessive vibrato, but almost entirely without the declamatory extravagances which occasionally caricature his later recordings with Karl Richter. Giebel's intimately expressed and radiantly coloured singing is already in place, though her voice is not fully matured and her performance of Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten (BWV 202) is less evenly controlled than her later version with Gustav Leonhardt (Teldec-Warner). There are other fine voices here aplenty, from among which I should mention soprano Gunthild Weber, who was a regular of Fritz Lehmann's (DG Archiv) in the early 1950s, soprano Johanna Behrend and contralto Charlotte Wolf-Matthäus, who made some notable contributions to the Bärenreiter-Cantate series of Bach's cantatas during the early 1960s. However, though listed among the soloists, soprano Edith Berger-Krebs does not, in the event, take part in any of these recordings.

In summary, here is an anthology which cannot fail to enchant most Bach enthusiasts. Readers will find cantatas which few if any other of the early pioneers committed to disc: BWV 88, for instance, with its twin images of the fishermen and huntsmen in its opening aria, sung with robust theatricality by Fischer-Dieskau. lch hatte viel Bekümmernis (BWV 21) is among the most poignant that I know, Krebs and Fischer-Dieskau firmly impressing a stamp of immortality upon Ristenpart's performance. Likewise, Wachet auf! ruft uns die Stimme (BWV 140), whose opening chorale fantasia is as thrilling as any I can recall. What a pity that the booklet omits the name of every single instrumentalist. Surely some of them, at least, must be known and if so they certainly should be included here since they play such a prominent role in the music. Ristenpart, by the way, remains faithful to Bach's precise instrumentation almost without exception, only preferring flutes to recorders, doubtless for practical reasons, in the opening chorus of Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele (BWV 180).

Audite must be congratulated on this invaluable rehabilitation. At times one can scarcely believe the modernity of approach and in all but one or two instances the excellence of the sound. A revelation.

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Man muss sich umstellen. Dass Bachs Orgel-Passacaglia leise beginnt, ist einem ja noch geläufig. Kaum dagegen, dass sie auch verhalten ausklingt. Selbst die populäre d-Moll-Toccata verzichtet hier am Schluss nach einem Decrescendo aufs Fortissimo. Die Bearbeitungen des 1897 verstorbenen Engländers William Thomas Best legen den Vergleich mit den orchestralen Bach-Arrangements eines Schönberg oder Stokowski nahe, weniger den mit Usancen heutiger organistischer Bach-Pflege. Die Farbe ist wichtig. Bach wird zum Briten. Best verfährt romantisch, eigenwillig. Für den Spieler wird er der Vordenker. Oft geht’s legato zu. Carsten Wiebusch präsentiert sehr gekonnt die schöne, 1966 erbaute und 2010 von der Bonner Werkstatt auch erweiterte Klais-Orgel der Christuskirche Karlsruhe erstmals auf Tonträger. Mit ihren 86 Registern ist sie die zweitgrößte Orgel der Evangelischen Landeskirche in Baden.

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