The Times (London), 31 January 2004
By HILARY FINCH

...rarely can such a diminutive physical presence have dared to take on such a giant of a concerto. Her small frame was all but torn apart by its virtuoso demands. Bent double in the stormy rhetoric of the opening, Midori stamped her silver shoes, took on the full might of the orchestra — and would then suddenly draw in her bow, and indeed the audience, for a moment of intimate duetting with the oboe.

After her triple-stopped cadenza, in which the violin seemed to be longing for metamorphosis into a horn, Midori found a new, dark beauty of tone in the cello register of the violin, as Dvořák's song drifted into its own transformation and became the slow movement.

Here, Midori's irresistibly fine, intensely focused quiet playing came into its own. The beauty of the slow movement's final, half-sobbed notes remained long after the stringent syncopations and mercurial drollery of the Slavonic dance of a finale had drawn prolonged and vocal ovations from the audience.