“Holly Mathieson got the first movement [of Berlioz] absolutely right in terms of finding a balance between structure and spontaneity – the opening music dreamlike, fragmented, episodic, creative, seemingly conjured out of the ether,  the conductor fluid in her movements, tending to use both arms as well as the baton to describe whole roulades of sound with her gestures, but getting the required “attack” as the strings raced through the cross-rhythms to the first “peak” of excitement, and pointedly bringing out the wind augmentations to the strings’ excitable reiteration of the opening."

Peter Mechen, Middle-C Classical Music Reviews , May 2021 (for NZSO: Takemitsu, Ker and Berlioz)