(Von Stade had suggested that he might set something by Robert Frost, a favourite poet of hers, but he preferred working with prose rather than verse because of the greater freedom that it afforded him.)

The engineers used studio reference monitor loudspeakers designed by Neil Patel and Keith O. Johnson, and built by Avalon Acoustics of Boulder, Colorado.

[1] The cover of the album, designed under the art direction of Bill Roarty of JTH, features a photograph of von Stade taken by Marcia Lieberman.

In 1983, he wrote, the English conductor Neville Marriner had urged the Minnesota Orchestra to commission Dominick Argento to compose a song cycle for the operatic mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade.

Von Stade had sung the cycle so often - if usually with piano or chamber group accompaniment rather than in the orchestral version of its first edition - that she "virtually becomes Elizabeth when she sings it".

Frederica von Stade's performance of the cycle did not find her in quite as fresh a vocal condition as when she had premiered it eighteen years previously, but she was as easy to like as ever, and she delivered the "highly singable" music that Argento had composed for her "with great authority".

[4] The Capriccio for Clarinet and Orchestra was "essentially light music blown up to concerto length", but its gentle last bars worked well, and Burt Hara was a fluent soloist.

Reference Recordings' engineers has created a "broad yet detailed sound-picture", although some listeners would find the gulf between the album's quietest and loudest passages too extreme for domestic comfort.