Magdalena Kožená is a remarkable singer. Her voice is a somewhat light mezzo with many colors, and she can shade it to a whisper or impress with a fortissimo high B-flat. Her range is absolutely even from top to bottom and she never switches gears; similarly she refuses to push the voice at either end. Her reading of Eboli's "Veil Song" from Verdi's Don Carlos is seductive and insinuating, with just the right Spanish flavor in the low-register roulades–but they're soft-focused. Perhaps she has no "chest" register, or is afraid to use it?

Victoria de los Angeles was one of the finest lyric sopranos in the decades after World War II. She was born Victoria Gómez Cima. She learned to sing and play piano and guitar while still in school. She entered the Conservatorio de Liceo in Barcelona to study piano and singing, completing the six-year program in three, and graduating with full honors at the age of 18. Her membership in the Conservatory's Ars Musicae gave her wide exposure to the art song repertory and Baroque and Renaissance music.

One of the most successful and admired opera singers of all time, Luciano Pavarotti was king among tenors from the late 1960s through the 1990s. His voice was noted for its exciting upper register, and tailor-made for the operas of Verdi, Bellini, Donizetti, and Puccini, and as it darkened slightly over the years, for the verismo composers as well. His vocal longevity, which kept him singing youthfully well into his sixties, and still beautifully after that, was a credit to his commanding technique and artistry, and remarkable considering his nearly 40 years of performing.

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.

Rich, smooth, creamy, and very, very warm, Renée Fleming's soprano pours all over the music of George Frideric Handel like melting chocolate. From the voluptuous Oh sleep, why dost thou leave me through the luxurious Endless pleasure to the opulent Calm thou my soul, Fleming's voice fulfills the heart and soul of Handel's music. Better yet, Fleming sounds like she really means it. Each aria has its own emotional character and each aria has its own musical personality.

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.