By David Honigmann [Financial Times, 2 January 2007]

Catherine Bott is a Hispanophile soprano specialising in the Renaissance repertoire. She also presents BBC Radio 3’s Early Music Show, fronting earnest inquiries into matters such as whether Tallis’s Spem in Alium was first performed at Nonesuch Palace. (Eventual anticlimactic conclusion: probably not.) When the modern art gallery owner Fred Mann established a record label, he asked whether there was a recording she had always wanted to make.