‘The ear, drawn into the atmosphere by the strings, was initially in fear of inappropriate sound from the piano, but the gentle chord clusters associated with its first entry were reassuringly in place. The poetry was sustained to the end, passing through formative but only vaguely defined allusions to music by other composers (helpfully defined by Woolrich as Debussy, Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann and Stravinsky) to a fairly clear echo of the Monteverdi madrigal which not only gave the work its name, but which also fitted it so convincingly to the scene of its first performance.’
The Times (Gerald Larner), 17 July 1997