'The range of the sound Britten draws from his voices and his handful of instruments hangs on in the mind - the flickering stin of his fire music, the stamping pagan violence of the Babylonian march as the players move around the church, the lash of his percussion, the clean treble voice that pierces the sound in the wonderful Benedicite in the furnace.  It is a much richer score than Curlew River, and a more accessible one; and to hold the convention of htese church parables with such an expansion of invention is an even more impressive demonstration of mastery.'
John Warrack, The Sunday Telegraph