Bass-baritone Klaus Mertens is celebrated by critics as an “excellent master of his craft” for his “unique power of expression, his congenial timbre, his keen intuition for text, as well as his convincing manner of making music”. He has recorded more than 200 CDs, including the entire works of Johann Sebastian Bach and Dietrich Buxtehude. These testify eloquently to his art of singing, which spans a great arch from Monteverdi to his contemporaries. Characterized as “the most significant Telemann interpreter of our time”, Mertens received the Telemann prize of the city of Magdeburg in 2016. In 2019, he was honored with the renowned Bach medal of the city of Leipzig as the “ideal interpreter of Bach’s cantatas and passion texts”.