This September, as part of the 2026 Brisbane Festival, Calvin Bowman will perform Johann Sebastian Bach’s complete organ works across a single day, guiding audiences through almost 16 hours of music.

If that sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime achievement, it isn’t. This will be the third time Bowman has sat down to perform this prodigious feat of musicianship, having undertaken it in 2009 for the Melbourne International Festival and 2022 during Tasmania’s MONA Foma Arts Festival.

It’s a huge undertaking. Starting at 6am in the QPAC Concert Hall, Bowman will take his seat at the console of the massive Klais Grand Organ and work his way through hundreds of pages of music spanning around 50 years of Bach’s output – dozens of preludes, fugues, chorale settings, fantasias and concertos ranging from intimate meditations written for church services to monumental works that have become synonymous with the organ itself.

Calvin Bowman. Portrait supplied

The physical challenge in playing so much music in one sitting is only one part of the equation, Bowman tells Limelight.

“The most important thing I’ve learned from doing this before is how to pace myself,” he says. “So I start with what I consider the most difficult works early in the morning – the six trio sonatas – and then work my way through from there.”

The program is carefully choreographed to help preserve Bowman’s focus and stamina. Collections of works are grouped together, interrupted only by brief five-minute pauses for a stretch, or the occasional necessities of life.

“There are no big breaks,” he explains. “The longest might be 10 or 15 minutes, because I don’t want to lose the momentum. I have to stay on point and keep going.”

That sense of physical and emotional continuity is deliberate. Rather than approaching the project as a series of chained-together Bach recitals, Bowman thinks of it as one immense musical journey, both for himself and for listeners, who are free to come and go throughout the day.

Every organ tells a different story

Adding another layer of complexity is the instrument itself.

Unlike concert pianists, who usually encounter variations of essentially the same instrument, organists must adapt to wildly different personalities wherever they perform. Consoles vary dramatically in layout, action and tonal design.
For Bowman, that’s part of the fascination.

“That’s what we do as organists,” he says. “We’re always playing different instruments, and that’s part of the beauty and the charm, and also the challenge.”

“You really have to deal with each instrument on its own terms. It’s important for me to go up and listen to it, find out the sonic possibilities and work my way through the works. I particularly enjoy exploring different colours on organs and getting unusual colours out of them.”

In that respect, Bowman sees himself following Bach’s own example.

“Commentators said that Bach would draw particular combinations of stops that people didn’t think could sound good. Then they listened and discovered that they did. I think he experimented too with unusual combinations of colours. He’s our example.”

The console of QPAC’s Klais Grand Organ.

Falling under the organ’s spell

Bowman’s own fascination with the instrument began unexpectedly as a schoolboy at Ballarat Grammar.

“I went into the chapel for a service and heard this sound up the back. It was really the deep notes. There’s a frequency about them that’s very comforting in a way. I remember thinking, that really feels good – feels good, not just sounds good. I really wanted to play that instrument.”

That fascination has never faded.

“You’re playing with your whole body,” Bowman explains. “If you’re playing a fugue with two hands and two feet, everything’s going in different directions. It’s like flying.”

The comparison is more apt than most.

When Philip Glass attended the reopening of Melbourne Town Hall’s restored Grand Organ in 2001 – where Bowman premiered Voices in the composer’s presence – Glass reportedly looked at the console and likened it to the cockpit of a Boeing 747.

Bowman agrees.

“They’re fairly complicated pieces of machinery. But like anything else, you get to know the instrument, you practise, and it becomes second nature.”

While organs are much more sophisticated than they were in Bach’s day, playing remains intensely physical, Bowman adds.

“It actually keeps you fit. You have to hold yourself up on the organ stool and move quickly, so you need very good core strength.”

The Klais Grand Organ. QPAC

Understanding Bach

Performing the complete organ works offers Bowman something few musicians ever experience: a panoramic view of Bach’s creative life.

“It’s a great privilege to be able to do it,” he says. “If I didn’t play them all at once, I wouldn’t have the same perspective.”
Although Bach never conceived the works as a single cycle, hearing them in succession reveals connections that individual performances cannot.

The familiar masterpieces emerge alongside rarely heard gems. Styles evolve. Ideas recur. The composer appears not simply as a technical genius but as a complete artist.

For Bowman, reducing Bach to any single characteristic misses the point entirely.

“He was a perfect amalgamation of mind, heart and spirit and those three elements – intellectual brilliance, emotional depth and profound faith – are inseparable.

“If we only focus on one of those things – the brilliance of the counterpoint, or the beauty of the line, or the Lutheran spirituality – we’re missing the point. It’s a great big spinning triangle.”

It is an insight earned not through scholarship alone but through decades spent living inside this music.

By the end of Brisbane Festival’s marathon, Bowman will have traversed virtually every corner of Bach’s musical imagination. He believes that the experience experience of spending so much time with Bach’s works amounts to something more than boast-worthy.

“There have been many great musicians throughout history,” he says. “But Bach is the great miracle and 16 hours in his company may be the closest we come to understanding why.”

Calvin Bowman plays the Complete Bach Catalogue for Organ in the Concert Hall, Queensland Performng Arts Centre, Brisbane on 13 September. A 2026 Brisbane Festival event.