To borrow a phrase used more than one by Gardiner, his is a reading which lives viscerally in the 'here and now'...throughout, the Monteverdi Choir is typically alert and tautly-sprung. Crowd scenes crackle with indignation...while the chorales are loving sculpted around a close reading of the texts...Padmore's Evangelist holds the whole together with the supple, hypnotic élan of a born story-teller...Truly this is a jewel beyond price.

Gardiner sets the waves gently but urgently lapping in a perfectly judged opening...Padmore's Evangelist is commanding, tireless and beautifully enunciated...There surely cannot be a better account on record. From first to last Gardiner imparts his love for the work and it comes across. The performers share his view and so do we. The liveness of the recording is palpable.

These performances, taped at the end of an English Baroque Soloists tour in 2006, exude a tremendous sense of common purpose and an un-dogmatic stylistic assurance...Gardiner gets the music to “speak” without ever sounding fussy. In short, he achieves that rare feat of revitalising the familiar.

Padmore's Evangelist is both ringingly true and acutely observed...perhaps the most disarming quality overall is that Gardiner's understanding of devotional ritual - drawn unquestionably from his unique Pilgrimage a few years earlier - translates into a new world, not wrinkle-free but one where sadness and hope seem to hover as tantalisingly in this work as I have heard.