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...