This isn't Nikolaus Harnoncourt's first recording of Beethoven's late "Solemn Mass" ... but it's his first on period instruments, and his last official recording. It's not perfect - the violin solo in the Benedictus sounds scrawny - but no performance of this daunting masterpiece can be. The soloists, Laura Aikin, Bernarda Fink, Johannes Chum and Ruben Drole, blend wonderfully.  Hugh Canning

... unsurprisingly for Harnoncourt, there is a sense of searching throughout the performance, perhaps partly because he had never before recorded the work with his own Concentus Musicus Wien, and their period instruments, gut strings and lower pitch threw up new sonorities and new puzzles for his questing brain to solve. The solo quartet, led by the poised soprano Laura Aikin, is light-voiced, and with supple singing from the Arnold Schoenberg Chor, it’s a gentle performance overall. But Harnoncourt’s masterly control of the larger structure means that within those parameters, the moments of jubilation make all their impact.  Erica Jeal

This is a remarkable account of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis and, in one important respect, an unusual one. For though it is in no sense lacking in drama, it is in essence a deeply devotional reading. And aptly so. ‘Mit Andacht’ – ‘with devotion’ – Beethoven writes time and again during the course of the work. ... The soloists were clearly hand-picked for the enterprise, not least the tenor Johannes Chum, whose singing can best be described as seraphic. The recording, by engineers from Austrian Radio, is mellow-toned yet crystal-clear, so beautifully adjusted are the balances between solo and choral voices and the lovely sounds of Concentus Musicus’s old instruments. I read that Harnoncourt wished this recording to be, in some sense, his personal legacy. It’s not difficult to see why.  Richard Osborne

This is billed as Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s final recording. Taken from live concerts in July last year, eight months before his death, it finds the Austrian maestro on characteristically trenchant form. There was always a raw honesty to his Beethoven and that is crytallised in the Missa Solemnis as a clash between religious awe and human defiance, Beethoven with his fists raised up the heavens.