The highlights were a piano quintet by David Knotts, eloquent lines of construction fused with a seamlessness of idea and feeling.
Andrew Clark (The Financial Times) 21 January 2008
Young lions were well represented. David Knotts’ Hover for clarinet and piano combined a natural cut and thrust with glittering poise.
Rian Evans (The Guardian) 28 August 2007
And there was another new work, On such a night as this is!, three well-made, often witty piano quintet movements by David Knotts.
Paul Driver (The Sunday Times) February 2007
The contemporary was David Knotts, about whom the programme notes told us nothing but the music told plenty. His one-movement Kitharodia for piano quartet (1998) begins in juxtapositions of short phrases and scurryings, not unlike Weir. But it evolves into arcs of self-generating melody, building to climaxes of an almost 19th-century Romantic rhetoric. One does not often hear such "old fashioned" techniques renewed so freshly. There is real musicality here.
Bayan Northcott (The Independent) 3 April 2006
Katherine Craik’s wonderful ghost story set on a remote shore was stark and atmospheric. A chorus of Winds and The Seas lie in wait for those who venture onto the isolated beach. Six Explorers come across an abandoned lighthouse where they are claimed by Ghost Children and set to haunt the beach for eternity. The text is suitably goose-pimply – ‘we are lost in time at the end of the world’ chant the Ghost Children in a spine-chilling sequence. David Knotts’ score has a lot going for it – angular, atonal harmonies built around folk tunes and modality.
Matthew Peacock (Opera Now Magazine) March/April 2003
…Knotts' 10-minute Kitharodia seemed positively prolix. Inspired by the Homeric character Thamyris, a singer who accompanied himself on a five-string harp, it casts the piano as the harp while the strings deliver the increasingly impassioned and convoluted song. It's impressively effective.
Andrew Clements (The Guardian) 4 April 2006
But I was also immensely impressed by two Spitalfields Festival commissions that tied in with this year's theme of Huguenot music: Golden Threads and Silver Strings, a completely engaging cantata by David Knotts for professional soprano, oboe, harp and narrator, and children from a local primary school.
Clare Stevens (Classical Music Magazine) December 2003
Golden Threads and Silver Strings told the story of an imaginary journey made my two real-life Huguenot refugees, played and sung by the pupils of the local Canon Barnett Primary School. They certainly flung themselves into the performance with smiling enthusiasm…the songs composed byDavid Knotts…were written in that graceful, slightly Frenchified idiom you find on British filmscores of the 1950s. It was harmonically quite sophisticated…The whole thing had a charming, slightly quaint air, magnified by the faded, peeling intimacy of the country’s oldest music hall.
Ivan Hewett (The Times) June 2003
David Knotts’ Nightwatching: ways of looking at the Moon, was brimful of ideas and motifs, introduced by an Italianate - and brilliantly played - trumpet solo. Although there was no obvious reference to Puccini there was a strong pull in that direction and I think that the opera house will claim Knotts before long.
Chris Robins (Huddersfield Examiner) November 2002
The most memorable of these scores was David Knotts’s Barcarola: Adorni di Canto, which hinted at the lilt of Venetian music with ghostly, hesitant ebb and flow.
John Allison (The Times) May 1999
For me, the lure was a new piece for clarinet and piano by David Knotts. Called Washed among the Stars, it swam in notes like late-Romantic Tippett, pleasurably self-assertive and extremely memorable.
Michael White (Independent on Sunday) October 1996
