Given the commercial doldrums in which classical music finds itself, it may seem hard to imagine a time when the idea of a star organist seemed conceivable. Yet the late British-American musician E. Power Biggs was such an organist. His recordings of Bach and Buxtehude and even Scott Joplin were heard at cocktail parties, even blared from the windows of 1960s college dormitories. This reissue from the European budget outfit Berlin Classics has the faults common to the quickie repackagings of its ilk -- the sound transfers but thinly from the 1970 LP; there is no hint as to the origin of that LP (other than that it was apparently made in West Germany and featured Biggs' rarely encountered first name, Edward); there are no notes whatsoever; and the whole program comes in at an ungenerous 40 minutes plus. Yet the listener encountering this disc at a European convenience store or American download site will get his or her money's worth, for it gives a little slice of what made Biggs so compelling. He just tried to give the mighty Bach his due, and more often than not he succeeded. Consider the vast Passacaglia in C minor for organ, BWV 582. In this work Bach runs dizzying rings around the conventional treatments Italian instrumentalists applied to the old passacaglia bass line, and Biggs defines the work's multiple cycles perfectly. It has to do with the way he hangs back at the beginnings of the phrases in the thinner iterations of the passacaglia pattern, reserving straight-ahead motion for the points where the music builds, and tying things together by just slightly pushing the tempo as the work proceeds. He never moves into Romantic territory or does anything even slightly crass, but he catches the attention even of those casual listeners in the college dorms from the very first bars. Biggs' Columbia recordings, now mostly reissued as well, make better representations of his mature style, but this disc is an inexpensive place to start with Biggs -- or with Bach's masterpieces for organ.