You can't blame the consumer for looking at the name above the title on Centaur's Johann Christoph Pez (1664-1716) and thinking, "doesn't Pez come out of a plastic dispenser topped by the head of Donald Duck?" Indeed it does, but a mere four centuries ago there was a Bavarian composer by that name based primarily in Munich (although he studied in Rome), served briefly in Bonn and Cologne, and finally died in service to the court at Stuttgart. Johann Christoph Pez composed for both church and court, splitting his time between leading the court band, playing the organ in Lutheran services, and coordinating an endless stream of cantata performances obligatory to his situation and era. Not much of Pez's music survives -- of his four published opus numbers, Opus 3 is missing, and most of the remaining music is either sacred vocal, orchestral, or in the form of trio sonatas.
So is Centaur's Johann Christoph Pez (1664-1716) "as sweet as candy, but for your ears?" Not quite; although Grove's alludes to the existence of keyboard suites in the Austrian National Library that doesn't seem to turn up in its online database, Pez doesn't appear to have any surviving keyboard music, so organist
Laura Cerutti has arranged four of Pez's orchestral suites for organ. Occasionally these pieces sound like organ music, particularly the last movements of the Concerto Sinfonia in A minor and the opening of the Concerto Sonata in F, but for the most part this sounds like Baroque orchestral music played on the organ.
Cerutti's choice of organ, one built by Johann Nepomuk Holzhey in the 1780s and located in Weissenau, is a nice one that sounds like its in a great state of repair, and was built within a century of Pez's time. Nevertheless,
Cerutti's playing of Pez's music has a pedestrian, workaday quality about it; and you wonder why she would go to all the fuss of preparing these pieces for the organ only to play it like any old Sunday church music.
If you are interested in Pez, this is one of only a few selections available to you, and if you are interested in the Holzhey organ, this isn't a bad option for hearing it, as it is well recorded. Otherwise it's easier to say what this isn't than what it is -- it isn't Baroque organ music, nor is it an effective halfway house to Pez's orchestral music, nor is it particularly exciting to listen to. Perhaps this disc of Johann Christoph Pez (1664-1716) would be more interesting if it were topped by the head of Donald Duck.