This recording was made last May [1982] at a public concert in Vienna by Austrian Radio, the occasion being the 250th anniversary of Haydn's birth. The audience is so quiet that it was quite a time before I realized I was listening to a live recording; they applaud only at the end. The performance has the merits one would hope for—a certain freedom and exuberance—and defects one can easily forgive—such as the indeterminate background noise early in Part 3 and one or two roughnesses of ensemble hereabouts... The soloists in Parts 1 and 2 are excellent, Arleen Auger being for me the most pleasing. They sing quite beautifully together in the 'close harmony' sections. In Part 3 there are different soloists for Adam and Eve, and though it was perhaps a good idea to have a younger baritone for Adam than the admirable Walter Berry, Arleen Auger could have sung Eve standing on her head. Nevertheless, Gabriele Sima's voice has a creamily lyrical quality that is both pleasing and promising, and she can easily be forgiven for having problems with one or two of the brief coloratura passages Haydn gave her... The chorus responds well to what is asked of it; if they sometimes seem to be over-emphasizing the beats this is because the conductor does take some of the fugues too fast and push the rhythms too hard... Kuhn does reveal a lot of detail in the wind parts—notably that in the last chorus the trombones play the same phrase over and over again, which I had not noticed before; the phrase almost becomes an irritant, though I liked hearing the trombones more clearly than usual. Kuhn also gets a good mark for having a piano for the recitatives; I'm sure that by 1798 Haydn had got past wanting an oldfashioned harpsichord.

-- Gramophone [2/1983]
reviewing the original LP release of the complete Creation