"Gardiner's view of the work doesn't appear to have changed drastically since the first Gramophone Record of the Year-recording on DG, 1989 but the overall impression from listening to his two versions side by side is that the emotional temperature has been raised by a few degrees, resulting in a more dynamically intense reading. It's all the better for it, on the whole ... Technically ... the whole performance is in almost all respects a triumph ... Surely be set to match its predecessor's award-winning acclaim"

"It's not difficult to understand why Gardiner wanted this particular performance perpetuated: fine as the Archiv version is, the new one has an electricity of a kind that's hard to generate under studio conditions"