 The Covent Garden orchestra played as well as they knew how, "the solo detail and the velocity of their every response to Massenet's flickering orchestral palette [operating] as if with heightened awareness under the scrutiny of the laser beam".Colin Davis's conducting paced the opera "superbly", heightening and relaxing the tension of its words and music so that its drama was compulsively engrossing from its first bar to its last.Richard Fairman mentioned the album in a survey of Massenet's operas in "Gramophone"'s 2000 Awards issue.