Trumpets, a Trakl settting by Oliver Knussen runs for a mere three-and-a-half minutes. Yet within this span textures lurch precipitately between mysterious rustlings, mad gallops, cavernous echo-tones and shrieking, close-harmony fanfares in top clarinet register…beneath the harmonic surface there is a harmonic intelligence of rare cogency…’
Bayan Northcott (New Statesman), 7 March 1975

‘Knussen’s new piece is a brilliantly imaginative response to the verbal world of Trakl’s poem ‘Trompeten’. Always attentive both to the sound and sense of words – the poem opens with “trimmed willows” and with fantastic overlapping pianissimo tremolandos in the three clarinets – Knussen super-imposes with tensile brilliance purely musical rhythms onto the rhythms of the poem, a compressed structure onto the stanzaic structure.’
Richard Dyer (Boston Globe), 15 August 1975