Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times,
January 12, 2008

"The last piece on the program - which introduced to the West Coast the sensational young British trumpet soloist Alison Balsom - was Bernd Alois Zimmermann's concerto "Nobody knows de trouble I see." Written in 1954, it represents the attempt of a German composer to find a place for an African American spiritual in the world of the then-new German music, which was trying to replace old-fashioned emotion with the scientific method.

The result is a battle between angst and anti-angst (which is, of course, just another form of angst). And that lonely trumpet, which gets the jazz bug after some saxophonists ease the way, at least has friends in the fray.

Balsom handled the trumpet solos with exactly the right attitude. She was serious and resisted the temptation to swing more than she should. This is, in the end, Expressionist music, a German composer impossibly trying to reclaim from the ashes the freewheeling culture the Nazis destroyed!”