The New York Times, Arts, January 19, 2003

What Has Midori Done for an Encore? Plenty
By DAVID WRIGHT

Her inclusion in the concert was so last-minute that her name wasn't even in the program. Yet this was the event that made that name: Midori, which the Philharmonic ultimately released in different forms, including Mi Dori.
It was a concert by the New York Philharmonic to ring out the year 1982. Zubin Mehta, then the orchestra's music director, was presenting soloists in their teens who had performed in Young People's Concerts. Midori, then 11, played the big first movement of Paganini's Violin Concerto No. 1, some 23 minutes of hair-raising acrobatics.

The critics were variously impressed. Bill Zakariasen, in The New York Daily News, remarked on her "ferociously convincing temperament." Bernard Holland, in The New York Times, wished for more of the "unmarked innocence" of a child. He regretted that "this lovely, brilliant young girl tried so hard to act as if she were one of us," that is, a world-weary adult.