"Between them Jason Kao Hwang and Catherine Filloux have addressed the problem of combining Chinese and Western styles with astonishing success here. By placing their chamber opera The Floating Box in New York’s Chinatown and having as its protagonist Eva, the thoroughly American daughter of Chinese immigrants fascinated by the discovery that her dead father was a leading musician in China, they are not creating an artificial link between two very disparate cultures but mirroring something which is very real. Filloux recalls how she spent many hours recording oral histories from Chinese immigrants before embarking on her libretto and how a photograph in New York’s Museum of Chinese in the Americas gave her the idea of having at the opera’s core a box, placed on the family’s domestic altar, containing memorabilia of the family’s life in China."
- July/August 2005 issue of the International Record Review (London magazine)
"Selected as one of ten "favorite full-length opera recordings of the year" by Opera News, December 2005. “Catherine Filloux’s libretto, based on more than forty hours of oral histories she and Hwang recorded in New York City’s Chinatown, is vivid and concisely poetic.”
- Opera News, Recordings Critic’s Choice September 2005
