John Adams has a way of claiming the air around him. For the better part of fifty years, his music has defined the sound of American classical life, much as Aaron Copland’s did in the middle of the 20th century. So when a concert begins with Adams and then turns its attention elsewhere, the gesture carries weight. It suggests a quiet resistance: a willingness to acknowledge a dominant voice without letting it set the terms.
At Guarneri Hall on December 3rd, the Catalyst Quartet leaned into that tension. Their program, “Against All Odds,” opened with Adams’s brisk six-minute Fellow Traveler and closed with Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s String Quartet No. 1 “Cavalry”. Between the two stood a constellation of short works by younger composers—world premieres by Derrick Skye and Andrea Casarrubios, along with pieces by Jessie Montgomery, Jorge Amando Molina, and Aftab Darvishi. The lineup read like a study in how artists carve out space for themselves, whether by confronting the past, reframing inherited forms, or simply insisting on their own perspective.
Continue reading Nova Linea Musica hosts the Catalyst Quartet in Against All Odds a program of resistance and reach
Gathering Note 