I first interviewed the Cerny brothers six years ago, back when Scott and Robert were college students at Northern Illinois University. They were then the electronic-rock duo Planning the Rebellion, and I called their debut album "shockingly mature and assured."

Both of those things still apply, and you can add "ballsy" to mix.

Fronting their four-piece Cerny Brothers band, they'll be performing at the Redstone Room on December 22 as part of a holiday trip to the family home in Sherrard, Illinois.

Based in Los Angeles and playing an aggressive brand of acoustic Americana, Scott (now 24 years old) and Robert (25) brim with both confidence and an understanding of how the music industry works. They have big dreams they went to L.A. to fulfill, but talking to them last week, they weren't deluded about their chances, and they don't expect success to come knocking on their door.

"We've always made music and movies," Scott said of their move to California after college. "We just thought, 'What's the best place we could do both those things?'"

This is not one of those get-a-job-and-try-to-squeeze-in-our-passions-on-the-side things; they're all-in with music. "We don't have a backup plan," Scott said. "Fail or succeed, we have literally one objective": write songs, improve their live show, and "get good enough to a point where people can no longer ignore you. ... We're getting very good at going into a room and turning people who don't care about us into people that care about us."

The first impression of Anna Ash's These Holy Days album is her distinctive, boldly quirky singing - soulful, pliable, and off-center, comfortable in breathy coos and pointed, high-pitched peaks. The title track features a piercing vibrato that's ethereally visceral, both heavenly and a bit frightening. That's the kind of voice that sounds like a natural extension of personality honed over a lifetime, an idiosyncratic instrument that nobody ever had the heart to constrain or correct.

But in a phone interview this week, Ash - who will be performing at Rozz-Tox on December 16 and recording a Daytrotter.com session the next day- revealed that she only discovered this marvel over the past five years, and she's still exploring it.

"I didn't really even know what my voice sounded like until I was like 19 or 20 years old," she said. " I was very shy about singing as a kid. I was never very good because I was so scared and so nervous."

When the Quad City Symphony unveiled its versions of Mozart and Beethoven at the Adler Theatre on November 3, it stripped away the formalism of the Classical period and replaced it with the sensuality of mid-19th Century Romanticism. That approach by Conductor and Music Director Mark Russell Smith enhanced the literary thread that connected the five movements of Beethoven's "Pastorale," and the orchestra's consistently warm and expressive performance made both composers' music more satisfying.

Even though Mozart's Overture to The Magic Flute and Concerto for Clarinet (both composed in 1791) are paramount examples of Classical form, and Beethoven's 1808 Symphony No. 6 is a harbinger of the early Romantic movement, Smith had the orchestra perform with nuance beyond the scores - applying practices largely developed after these pieces were written.

In the middle of the turbulently self-expressive, politically conflicted, structurally groundbreaking nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven is a quiet outlier, a revolutionary work whose only discord is a thunderstorm.

It's hard to believe, but the tumultuous Fifth and the mild-mannered Sixth symphonies were premiered in the same ice-cold Vienna theater on December 22, 1808. Conceptually contrasting pieces, each work taps into a distinctly different aspect of Beethoven's personality. No. 5 is an emphatic example of how he portrayed his life through music - bitterness with Vienna, romantic failures, increasing deafness, and frustration with the music politics of the aristocracy. But Symphony No. 6 ("Pastorale") is devoid of this me-against-the-world battle. The conflict is gone because Beethoven had no conflict with nature. No. 6 is simply an observation and organization of what he called "the feelings of nature" put into music, and it enlarged the possibilities for the symphony as a form.

When Maestro Mark Russel Smith cues the Quad City Symphony to begin the "Pastorale" on November 3 and 4, don't listen for themes of fate, politics, or philosophy; let Beethoven's retreat into nature be your respite for 40 minutes. He points the way in his musical story by titling each movement so we know exactly what it's depicting - a first for a large-scale symphony.