Paul Driver, The Financial Times

Fortunato (1993) 

At the performance of Fortunato I attended the house was full, the average age was seventeen – half that of the town [of Umea] – and the final acclamation was overwhelming. McQueen with his music and Monaco-Westerstahl with her story and text {speak] to their …audience with vibrant directness…It is an archetypal brew, susceptible of any number of interpretations, religious, sexual, political…Fortunato is, in short, a true work of art, at once ambiguous and inevitable-seeming.
McQueen’s musical language here blossoms as never before. He is a composer who has survived early exposure to ravaging post-war complexity and achieved a most personal and mettled directness op utterance. His manner is eclectic but not essentially allusive: he uses a great variety of means, from the tonal to the electronic, but only to say what he has to say, never in a spirit of irony or of cultural tourism. Even when he writes for a Handelian coloratura soprano, it is with the purpose of thus expressing the icy detachment of a mysterious “Woman on the Mountain”…not to provide a parodistic knees-up.
This and most of the other solo lines are sensitively devised for the voice. His ensembles, of which there are a generous supply, are richly textured; the tutti finales of the first two acts have an astonishing sureness of touch – a genuinely cumulative power. His choral writing is zestful and catchy. But it is the orchestral writing that marks out the opera’s high points: the extraordinary declamation for unison high violins which accompanies the conscience-stricken Fortunato…at the outset of act 2; [and] the wordless love duet for the semi-supernatural couple “Voland and Mariella, which has the frankness of a pop song and the lyrical afflatus of later Tippett.  Fortunato simply has to be staged in Britain.