In a review for
AllMusic, Thom Jurek wrote: "When Murray plays you can feel, as Annette Peacock put it..., that there are at least 12 children inhabiting one adult body. He is everywhere creating, each time he plays, notions of polyrhythm and textural tonality that haven't existed before the moment he rolled them off his sticks onto the kit. His ability to produce contrapuntal invention is so effortless and instinctual you can feel Mateen... struggle to keep up with the flow.... This is a playful disc, one of ideas and fierce counterpoint, but one rooted in the warmth of creative exchange." A reviewer for
All About Jazz wrote: "Throughout this... session... Murray shows he hasn't lost the touch. Though polyrhythm and texture form the foundation of most of his work, he still manages to power through some vividly colorful expressionist moments... Mateen... moves fluidly between plaintive melodies and fiery saxophone sandblasting...
We Are Not at the Opera is a delicious morsel helping celebrate Murray's return to recording the ecstatic music he helped invent." Phil Freeman, writing for
Perfect Sound Forever, commented: "This concert... is credited not as a duo but to Murray with Mateen, and that's the way it sounds. Mateen begins the album blowing soft spirals of notes on a flute, as Murray slowly ascends from delicate cymbal washes and rumbles of kick-drum to what will become, over the course of the album, an awe-inspiring and breathtaking drum solo. Mateen, even when he begins playing alto and tenor saxophones later in the performance, can often do little but keep pace with the drummer's titanic earthquakes of sound. Murray shows clearly on this album that he has lost little of his power, and none of his sense of rhythm and dexterity." ==Track listing==