Elizabeth Watts is regarded as 'one of the finest British sopranos to have emerged in the last decade. Her reputation is steadily growing as she has performed s a recitalist, opera singer, and concert artist, she has already appeared at many of the world's leading musical centres and festivals, including the Royal Opera House, London, Wigmore Hall, Welsh National Opera, the BBC Proms, Santa Fe Opera, Boston's Handel and Haydn Society, and has engagements throughout Europe from Amsterdam to Zurich.

The marvelous voice of tenor Ian Bostridge could not be more perfect for this program of Bach cantatas and arias. Like Hans Hotter before him, Bostridge's voice has a unique ethereal quality, a hollow distance that identifies less with the character and more the spirit of the subject. His singing clearly captures the "disembodied presence", as Michel Roubinet aptly puts it in the booklet's notes, of the mortal somewhere between resignation of the world and the ultimate union with Christ–the theme that links every selection here.

In the 1990s, the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila established herself as one of the world's leading operatic sopranos. Coming to early attention as a prize-winning singer adept at the more lyric roles in the repertory, she developed the qualities of a dramatic soprano as well, with an especially warm and grand voice. She is a tall, blond, and striking woman with excellent stage presence and acting skills.

The music on this disc dates to 1996, shortly after the then-emerging young mezzo soprano Magdalena Kozená had graduated from the Bratislava College of Music. She gave a concert of Bach arias at a medieval Benedictine monastery in the old Moravian town of Trebic, as part of a music festival called Concentus Moraviae, and it evolved into the present disc. The disc itself was recorded not at the monastery, but at a Czech concert hall with very live, cathedral-like sound.