Geoff Brown at the Barbican [Times Online, 20 October 2006]
I looked around. No outsize broken bottles. No lethal injections on hospital gurneys. No baffling, maddening semaphore gestures. This was not Peter Sellarsís eccentric opera version of Handelís oratorio Theodora; though the memory of that Glyndebourne landmark was hard to escape. Emmanuelle HaÔm, Le Concert díAstrÈe, and the soloists certainly kept it close in their minds: the performance was dedicated to the memory of the late mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson ó so searing and engulfing at Glyndebourne in the role of the heroineís friend Irene.