In 1726 Bach entered a new period of creative innovation in Leipzig: renouncing the chorus, he built up a constant dialogue between solo arias and finely sculpted instrumental parts.The three cantatas presented here represent the culmination of this development, and have established their place as a peak of the recorded repertoire.

"If the public only knew it, singers of classical music can be diamonds every bit as rough as their rock counterparts. But the mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink is a notable exception: graceful, poised and intelligent, she is every inch the lady, and it's no surprise to learn that she's wife to the Austrian ambassador to Slovenia, the country of her ancestors.This personal elegance colours her approach to performance. She doesn't deliver Bartoli-style show-stopping exhibitionism (she raises her eyebrows slightly when I mention the name), because she is a musician of an older and more dignified school, valuing refinement, subtlety and sensibility over fireworks, and she never sings louder than lovely. Yet there's nothing genteel or pallid about her golden-toned voice.The emotions she evokes in baroque music and Mozart, as well as the more romantic terrain of lieder, Berlioz and Mahler, are marvellously vivid. In the 1980s she moved to Europe, but nothing much happened until she met the conductor René Jacobs, a counter-tenor of note "who understood the way my voice worked" and led her towards the baroque repertory where she has happily dwelt ever since. Bach is her desert island composer, she says, with Monteverdi second. She has sung with Jacobs for almost 20 years, but is equally sought after by great names such as John Eliot Gardiner and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, alternating concerts with lieder recitals, the latter often with the English pianist Roger Vignoles. Opera plays a diminishing part in her schedule.As an ambassador's wife and mother to two, she dislikes being away for long periods and limits herself to "perhaps one set of performances a year": in 2008, it will be Idomeneo, in Barcelona." [with René Jacobs, recorded for harmonia mundi, June release 2009] The Daily Telegraph