Spy Review: Cinematic Classical Gas, by Steve Parks

From chamber music to movie scores, many high-brow composers could do it all. Chesapeake Music’s Sunday matinee “Interlude” performance – its final 2025 concert – featured five whose works, richly presented by the Catalyst Quartet, originally played in venues ranging from concert and opera halls to movie and TV screens.

The program opened with John Adams’ “Fellow Traveler,” a short piece written as a birthday gift to his friend and collaborator Peter Sellars, with whom he wrote the 2005 opera “Doctor Atomic” about the life and career of Robert J. Oppenheimer – also the title character in “Oppenheimer,” winner of the 2024 best picture Oscar. The “father of the atomic bomb” was later investigated for communist sympathies, which made him a so-called “fellow traveler.” In his opening remarks, cellist Paul Rodriguez thanked Adams for his permission to play the piece, which is given only sparingly.

“Fellow Traveler” weaves together echoes of Adams’ “Son of Chamber Symphony” and his best-known opera, “Nixon in China,” also created with Sellars. His work is characterized by a minimalist style of repeating patterns mixed with the late Romantic influences of Mahler and others. Violinist Ali Fayette led much of the piece’s melodic theme, such as it is.

More minimalism followed with the next two selections by Max Richter and Baltimore native Philip Glass. Richter’s six-minute “On the Nature of Daylight” from his 2004 “The Blue Notebook” album may sound familiar to viewers of the popular streaming series “The Handmaid’s Tale” with its cycles of introspective harmonies, from a mournful all-stings opening to a brief violin solo deftly played by Karla Donehew Perez, introducing a new rhythmic theme.

Glass’ 18-minute String Quartet No. 3, written as a score for Paul Schrader’s 1985 film “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” about Japanese novelist Yoika Mishima, reflects each of the life chapters in six movements, building toward a finale of swelling bursts of energy climaxed by heaving sighs of relief – or is it regret? – led by the Catalyst violinists, including Fayette, who said Mishima was radicalized by Japan’s leanings to the West throughout decades of war in Afghanistan.

Two longer compositions comprised the second half of the concert, starting with Bernard Herrmann’s 20-minute “Echoes for a String Quartet.” In terms of music for the cinema, Herrmann’s award-winning career ranks among the greatest in the 20th century with credits spanning from Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” (1941) to Martin Scorcese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976). His string quartet figuratively echoes musical hallmarks from his illustrious career – short phrases repeated again and again while posing in varied dynamic tempos and dramatic situations which, as violinist Perez said, “makes you feel like you’re in a movie.” To that end, its emotional rollercoaster is tempered by thoughtful passages performed with delicate expression by cellist Rodriguez and violist Paul Laraia.

Of the five composers on the “Cinematic Refuge” program, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s string quartet was the most classically “classic,” if you will. His 1933 quartet in four movements is considered the most “Viennese” in his body of work. It opens with an allegro of weeping and laughing sensibility followed by a larghetto of deeply felt melancholy followed by an intermezzo laced with his typically melodic charm and closing with a highly spirited and sweepingly danceable waltz. Quite Viennese, indeed, in violist Laraia’s words, “Romanticism as he colorfully created later in Hollywood.

But the stars of Sunday’s matinee were the four on-stage collaborators who so skillfully delivered precise, well-practiced and in-the-moment spontaneity

CATALYST QUARTET: ‘CINEMATIC REFUGE’

Chesapeake Music concert, Sunday, Nov. 23, Ebenezer Theater, Easton. chesapeakemusic.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic now living in Easton.