Fellow Traveler is a short single movement for string quartet, composed as a fiftieth birthday present for the stage director Peter Sellars, Adams’s long-time collaborator and librettist for his opera Doctor Atomic. It’s a characteristic piece of Adams in his most immediately appealing style, marked by punchy rhythms and urgent momentum, that harks back to some of Adams’s most successful earlier works such as Shaker Loops and A Short Ride in a Fast Machine. 

© Nigel Simeone