'....and a sinister-comic fascination in Morgan Hayes' Opera,which is much the best piece on the CD '

Ivan Hewitt, BBC Music Magazine, August 2006

'.....violin and piano dart in and out of each other 's patterns like children on speed playing hopscotch. It makes an exhilarating conclusion to the disc'

Peter Quantrill, The Strad, July 2006

Perhaps the other two most impressive pieces [besides the Powell and Harrison] are Joseph Phibbs's early Fantasia and the Morgan Hayes composition, Opera, from which the anthology takes its title. That title comes in turn from a film by Dario Argento, and much that Hayes has to say about the movie—'sophisticated melodrama...stylised violence...prowling camerawork...heightened awareness'—applies to his music. The piece has its own vein of melody, moving through unisons in which the instruments shadow one another ('prowling camerawork') and more fully lit passages.

Paul Griffiths, Words and Music, April 2006

Morgan Hayes draws on Italian film director Dario Argento in a piece whose abrupt yet logical alternation of moods outlines an abstract scenario of vividly imaginative scope.

Richard Whitehouse, Gramophone, September 2006

... it lends its title to the disc and may just be the best piece on it. Taut, nervy and neo-Expressionist, this is a compelling work whose sudden dislocations of texture, shape and direction are centrifugal forces that threaten to tear it apart but that lead instead to a grotesque, boogie-like conclusion whose ghoulishness is wonderfully effective.

Christopher Ballantine, International Record Review, October 2006