Alfred Deller’s recorded career could only have developed in the way that it did at a label like Vanguard with its founder and owner Seymour Solomon at its helm. Independent record labels, like most small businesses, thrive on a connection between an owner and their obsessions. Seymour Solomon loved baroque and renaissance music at a time when the World's exposure to music of those eras was generally much more narrow than now. Today’s landscape reveals concrete superhighways to Hildegard von Bingen where there were once cow paths.

It is quite a feat to distill this monumental body of work into one CD. Luckily, Solomon and Deller already did the work with a double LP, The Art of Alfred Deller, which provided the basis for this selection covering as it does the range of his work.