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Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan have already made an impressive contribution to the recorded canon of Johann Sebastian Bach's sacred music; Suzuki's outstanding cycle of Bach's cantatas for BIS was up to Volume 36 by 2007. Suzuki has also recorded Bach's Passion settings, leaving only the Mass in B minor. With the release of BIS' Super Audio CD J.S. Bach: Mass in B minor, Suzuki thrusts his gauntlet forth on the largest and most visionary of Bach's sacred works.

Suzuki's area of expertise is in reproducing more or less exactly Bach's performance milieu, as far as that can be determined from existing sources -- Bach's "intentions" constitute the holy grail insofar as period-specific groups are concerned. In the case of the Mass in B minor, composed throughout Bach's life from about the late 1720s but not compiled into a finished form until the end of it, Bach's intentions as such were likely that he didn't expect the work be performed at all, at least not in his lifetime. A dedicated, stubborn Lutheran; nevertheless, Bach could not resist the pull of the Mass text and even cannibalized some of his own Lutheran service music to fill out the liturgical structure of his Mass, much too long and complex for an ordinary service anyway. By the time it was performed in the nineteenth century, the gigantic vision that Bach reserved for his only large-scale mass was already somewhat familiar from similarly ambitious music composed in the meantime. It was commonplace until the 1980s to perform the Mass in B minor with the large forces associated with the era in which it was first heard.