• Soile Isokoski is hailed as one of the finest singers in the world: “Isokoski's lyric soprano is like liquid gold.” (Fanfare). Her CDs for Ondine have been praised as top-choice recordings and garnered the highest distinctions at the BBC Music Magazine Awards, Gramophone Awards and MIDEM Classical Awards.

• This recording features the revised 1948 version of Paul Hindemith’s Das Marienleben (The Life of the Virgin Mary), a musical setting for voice and piano of Rainer Maria Rilke’s cycle of fifteen poems of the same name. The work remains one of Hindemith’s key masterpieces; Glenn Gould called it “the greatest song cycle ever written.”

• Soile Isokoski here performs together with her longstanding duo partner Marita Viitasalo.

• The booklet includes expert notes by Giselher Schubert (Hindemith Institute, Frankfurt/Main), as well as the complete song texts in the original German and in English translation.