PRESS AND REVIEWS
SNOW REVIEW AT CLF ART CAFE, LONDON – ‘AN AUSPICIOUS DEBUT’
The Stage * * * *
21 February, 2017
A new company debuts with not one opera but three. Snow is a composite work, with one librettist telling three stories all related to Snow White, each of them set by a different composer. The show takes place on three floors of the CLF Art Cafe, with performers and audience moving downwards as the evening proceeds.
...The final opera, Tom Floyd’s The Crystal Casket, is the longest and the most musically complex, with a Prince and his mother arguing over the dead body of Snow White, who eventually comes back to life...
Murphy’s score provides a subtle and delicate beauty, if not quite enough variety of pace, Treacher’s an uneasy nervous energy and some clever offstage choral effects; but Floyd’s piece offers the greatest textural and coloristic range, bringing the evening to a powerful close.
STRIKING TRILOGY: SNOW, A NEW OPERA IN THREE ACTS WITH THREE COMPOSERS
Planet Hugill * * * *
21 Feb 2017
Snow is the first production from a new opera company, The Opera Story. With a libretto by JL Williams based on the Snow White story, the opera featured music by Lewis Murphy, Lucie Treacher and Tom Floyd (an act each)...
I though that Floyd's music for this act was the most complete, he wrote in a rather dark dramatic idiom with some angular lines, yet created really intense vocal images. The queen was given a really meaty solo which Polly Leech sang superbly, and Rick Zwart was brilliant as the rather strange and disturbed prince.
PERFORMANCE OF NOTE: ULALUME (A NEW ORGAN CONCERTO)
Choir and Organ Magazine
October 2015
‘I’m not an organist and I’m pretty sure I’d be terrible at it – far too much to do at once!’ These words, however, have not prevented Tom Floyd from writing his first Organ Concerto, which will be premiered by James O’Donnell at the inaugural recital on the
newly restored Hill organ at St John’s, Hyde Park.
The Sirian insurgency: MICROmegas at Tête à Tête
One Stop Arts * * * *
21 Feb 2017
An excellent start to Tom Floyd and David Spittle's work-in-progress opera MICROmegas, after Voltaire's short story, presented as part of Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith.
...the libretto includes some absolute gems – "Cold toes and a broken compass / Don't make a man Columbus", says the embittered Poet to the vainglorious Captain of the beleaguered Arctic vessel – though at times we're reminded that Voltaire doesn't sound too PC to modern ears: "Behind every successful man is a woman he had to overcome". Floyd's music, not unlike mid-period Britten, is written with a lyrical understanding of the human voice not always found in modern classical music.