Janowski demands heroic efforts in speed and intensity. He favours a swift performance, and in this live Tristan that means more excitement than emotion. Soprano Nina Stemme is the ranking Isolde of our time; she has a beautiful voice and paces herself perfectly. But I can't hear much passion in the delivery.

Tristan confirms Nina Stemme as the Isolde de nos jours. She and Stephen Gould are at their best in the Act 2 love duet, which obliges them to sing lyrically. Gould’s Tristan is otherwise rough and ready.

It is something of a miracle that a recording of Tristan and Isolde as accomplished as this one can emerge from a single concert performance…It is highly dramatic, tremendously well sustained and very well recorded, so that the mighty structure and the richly blended textures emerge with unusual
clarity and immediacy.

this finds [Stemme] at her glorious peak, making much more of the text than in her previous recordings. She now stands proud as the leading Isolde and Brünnhilde of her generation and an interpreter to rank with her greatest predecessors on disc...[Gould] is probably the darkest-voiced contemporary interpreter of the exhausting part, and he is tireless and touching, if not always tonally alluring.