Minimalists – London Chamber Orchestra

There is a particular pleasure in hearing minimalism played by an orchestra that clearly does not specialize in it. The London Chamber Orchestra under Christopher Warren-Green brings something to these four scores that the usual suspects — the Bang on a Can crowd, the new-music ensembles who treat repetition as gospel — tend to iron out in the name of authenticity. These players phrase. They breathe. There’s vibrato where you might not expect it, a sense of long paragraph structure imposed on music that in lesser hands becomes wallpaper.

Shaker Loops remains the piece to beat here, and has been since 1978, when Adams essentially willed himself a career with it. The work began life as a string septet called Wavemaker — Adams scrapped an earlier version entirely, which tells you something about how exacting he can be even inside a style that trades on obsessive repetition. What strikes me afresh in this interpretation is the violence underneath the shimmer. That opening tremolo — strings rubbed almost raw, bows digging in — isn’t pretty. It’s closer to anxiety than to the pastoral calm people assume minimalism traffics in. Warren-Green’s cellos and basses, when they shoulder their way into the texture a couple of minutes along, do so with real weight; you feel the floor shift under the music rather than merely hearing a new voice added to the mix.

“Hymning Slews,” the third movement, is where this album earns its keep. The glissandi slide and curdle — gorgeous, yes, but there’s something faintly nauseating about them too, like a tape machine losing its pitch. Adams has spoken of Shaker dance as ecstatic, bodies moving until something breaks open, and the LCO strings understand that the loops in “Loops and Verses” need to tighten like a tourniquet before they can release. The ending, when it comes, simply quits — no cadence, no bow, the rug pulled. It still startles, even on a fourth or fifth hearing. That’s rare. Most minimalism, once you know the shape, loses its power to surprise. This doesn’t.

Glass fares well too, though differently. Façades began life as incidental material — it was written originally for the saxophonist Jon Gibson, and the film Koyaanisqatsi reassigned it to those slow-panning shots of Wall Street on an empty Sunday, all that steel and glass standing vacant. You hear the vacancy in this performance: the string ostinato turns over and over with a kind of patient melancholy, while the soprano saxophone solo — plangent, a little reedy in tone here — cuts through like someone walking alone down an avenue at dawn. It’s gorgeous, unapologetically cinematic, and I don’t say that as an insult. Glass more or less invented the sound-language that Hollywood composers from Zimmer to Jóhannsson later diluted and sold back to us. Hearing Façades straight, without the visuals, you notice how much tension lives inside those overlapping arpeggios — a tension film tends to flatten out.

Company, heard in the string orchestra version rather than the original quartet (written, let’s remember, for a stage adaptation of Beckett’s prose piece), loses none of its nervous energy in the expansion. If anything the added bodies give the outer movements an eerie calm, voices doubling into something like a held breath, while the center section turns edgier, almost combative.

Reich’s Eight Lines gets a reading that favors clarity over bite: every interlocking cell audible, textures scrubbed clean, tempos a shade more relaxed than the composer’s own Ensemble recordings. Some will miss the knife-edge precision Reich himself demands. I didn’t, entirely. There’s a case for hearing this music breathe rather than tick.

Dave Heath’s The Frontier closes the disc as something of an afterthought: pleasant, competently wrought, clearly indebted to the three composers preceding it, and just as clearly not in their league. No shame in that. Not every piece needs to be a landmark.

Against Adams’s own recordings — the Ojai performance, the San Francisco forces who’ve made Shaker Loops something of a signature — this version holds its own through sheer tonal beauty and interpretive intelligence. A genuinely good way in for the uninitiated, and more than satisfying for those who already know the territory.