The Medal of Merit from the Czech Republic in 1996, made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1997 and in 2003 a Companion of Honour in the Queen's Birthday Honours.

In his 80th year, in 2005, he was given an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal Academy of Music (he is only the third person to receive the honour), the Royal Philharmonic Society's highest honour, the Gold Medal, and the Queen's Medal for Music - a new annual award for an individual who is judged to have had a major influence on the musical life of the nation.

The Financial Times: ‘Mackerras has theatre in his blood: you hear it every time he walks into the pit… But when it comes to making music,

New York Times: ‘Sir Charles's stock is toweringly high... in the 1940's, he was largely responsible for introducing Western audiences to the music of Janáček. In the 1950's, he was arguably the first mainstream conductor to take period-performance issues seriously. He has been one of the world's leading Mozarteans, a renowned Handelian, a vigorous proponent of opera in English translation, an early champion of Benjamin Britten, a surprisingly learned devotee of Gilbert and Sullivan... making you wonder whether any other conductor has acquired quite so many specialties or put them into practice with so many ensembles.’

Janáček’s Katya Kabanova
Opera: ‘Charles Mackerras worked his magic again… How does he do it? It is not only with Janáček. He has only to step into the Covent Garden pit and everything is transformed. The orchestra's playing, excellent as it usually is for other conductors, acquires a special authority and a fresh bloom of tone reserved for him. The tenderness of the strings in this performance was enough to bring tears to the eyes, but there was no sentimentality. The ejaculations on the brass and the strange chimes on harps underlined the heroine's tragedy as it reached its climax. He knows every nook and cranny of this score and it sears the soul of the listener with renewed intensity every time.’

Mozart's Die Zauberflöte
The Guardian: ‘The reason not to miss this is Charles Mackerras's conducting. There are times when the ROH Orchestra sounds like a real period band, in the best sense. It's a treat to hear the bassoons huffing away with such point and focus, and the strings, swept along by those bass lines, are consistently lively too. The staging may be dark, but there's plenty of light coming from

everything Mackerras does - and it’s an unusually broad range - he does wonderfully well… The three areas where he has been hugely influential are Handel, Janacek and Mozart’s vocal music. Scholarly but never academic, he showed the musical world what it was missing or getting wrong. A few weeks ago (2005) Mackerras was back in Prague to conduct a recording of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, a work long laid in stone. Casting his eye over the autograph score, he made a discovery: what had always been played as whole-tone trills in the third movement were in fact half-tones. ‘It explained a lot of conundrums’, he says, ‘and made quite a difference to the series of chords that you trill to’. That’s vintage Mackerras - ever eager to look at things afresh. Taking a new view is rare enough in a 30-or 40-year-old. It is exceptional when you are 80.’

the pit.’
The Sunday Times: ‘Charles Mackerras presides, with bracing, quasi-authentic tempi; transparent, airy textures; and great thwacks on the kettledrums to make us all sit up in the overture. This is Mozart as close to perfection as it’s possible to hear today...’