Rarely and unpredictably, a performance will transcend music and become a living thing, a forceful creature that grabs the audience and won’t let go until the piece ends; it then lingers for hours in the mind. These experiences transport me beyond what Gustav Mahler called “the sounds of a garrulous world” and overshadow the conductor and musicians – not because they’re unimportant, but because the life-giving in their performance is so profound. On Saturday at the Adler Theatre, the beast arrived after intermission when the Quad City Symphony Orchestra and Music Director and Conductor Mark Russell Smith breathed life into Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 1.

In an interview, Robert and Scott Cerny – who will be playing as the Cerny Brothers on December 23 at the Redstone Room – said their album Dream grew out of one song: “I Want You to Run.” The record’s second track, it fuses elements of country, folk, and bluegrass with polished vocal and lyrical stylings that sound more like pop.

Starting at an ambling pace, “I Want You to Run” mixes a simple drum and high-hat beat supporting steel and acoustic accompaniment that rolls into the first verse: “I want you to run / Past your childhood home / To the great unknown.”

This verse embodies the major thematic element of the album – that yearning to leave, that desire to take a chance and have someone else come along to share the experience. The writing here has a simple elegance and unforced honesty that work with the intricate pick work to create a sense of urgency. Here there’s a radical optimism that’s at the core of the entire album, a refusal to believe that dreams are better deferred than pursued.

The Envy Corps sell a T-shirt that proclaims the Iowa- and Nebraska-based band is “Radiohead for Coldplay Fans.”

Vocalist and bassist Luke Pettipoole said in an interview last week that he came up with the idea with his tongue in cheek, and that he’s been surprised how receptive fans have been. “People really seem to enjoy it,” he said. “I don’t know if they’re making fun of us, or we’re making fun of Coldplay, or what.”

But it’s possible there’s no mockery involved at all. After a one-record stint on major-label imprint Vertigo (which released 2008’s Dwell), the Envy Corps returned this fall with the self-released full-length It Culls You. Beyond the way Pettipoole’s phrasing and frequent falsetto bring to mind Thom Yorke (“I sing the way I sing,” he said), the album sounds like the child of Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief – and in the best way possible. Spacious yet full, odd yet alluring, the parentage is obvious but It Culls You never feels like you’re listening to a clone. If Coldplay figures in, it’s in the way the Envy Corps favors accessibility over alienation.

The titles of the first two Masterworks concerts in the Quad City Symphony Orchestra’s season indicate a distinct shift – from the pure music of Beethoven 5 (named for the showcase piece) to the literary-themed Poems on Fate.

Concert planners were obviously aiming to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between language and music in the November concerts. But somewhere between the idea for Poems on Fate and the selection of its music, the conceptual glue lost its cohesion. The audience’s perfunctory response at the Adler Theatre on November 5 was in stark relief to the profuse applause and standing ovation that greeted Beethoven 5’s first performance, and it was clear that something had gone wrong.

All four pieces in the Poems on Fate program clearly fit the theme. Johannes Brahms’ Song of Destiny used text from a poem, Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Forza del Destino a libretto, and Richard Strauss’ Death & Transfiguration and Franz Liszt’s Les Preludes inspired poems that were included as prefaces in their published scores.

The challenge for program planners was to maintain the integrity of the musical experience while coherently demonstrating its connection to literature. (It would have helped if the prefaces had been included in the printed program, to provide a fuller literary context for the audience but also to demonstrate the florid style characteristic of the period when the music was composed.) And while the literary connections worked, the music, as a program, didn’t.

After singer/songwriter Rachael Yamagata was freed from her contract with Warner Bros., she called producer John Alagia about making her third album. She didn’t send him songs to consider, and they didn’t discuss material. The next day, they were making arrangements to get equipment and musicians to his house in Maryland.

“Within a few weeks, we were ... actually doing it,” Yamagata said in a phone interview this week, promoting her November 12 performance at the Redstone Room.

Moving quickly was a response to “several years of kind of being in this holding-pattern experiment with major record labels,” she said. “It was a lot of leap-before-you-look scenarios. I just knew that if you got the right people in the room, we could make it work.”

And the right people wanted to help. “I think people look at me maybe as an underdog of sorts, always wanting good things for me,” she said. “A lot of my peers I think have felt the frustration with me about ‘Where’s your next record?’ or ‘Why aren’t you on the road?’”