Adams: Shaker Loops; The Wound-Dresser; Short Ride in a Fast Machine.Adams: Shaker Loops Written in 1978 by the American composer John Adams, Shaker Loops was originally written for string septet. The version for string orchestra was written in 1983. The work is in four movements.
He has appeared in many of world's most prestigious opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera, Seattle Opera, , baritone; Marin Alsop Marin Alsop (born October 16, 1956) is an American conductor, and the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore, Maryland. Born in Manhattan, New York City to professional musician parents, she later attended Yale University but then transferred to the , Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is an English orchestra which, despite its name, is now based in the adjacent town of Poole rather than in Bournemouth where its former home in the Winter Gardens concert hall was demolished in May 2006. . Naxos 8.559031. It's not hard to understand why composer John Adams' Shaker Loops is one of this modern composer's most popular works. As conductor Simon Rattle has explained, Adams' music has "always seemed to be moving forward in space, that I would imagine while listening to it that I was in a light aircraft flying rather fast, close to the ground." Very true. Adams' music has a wonderful forward momentum, and in Shaker Loops, especially, a strong rhythmic beat. The present album contains four works quite different from another, particularly for a composer best known as a minimalist. The disc begins with a real barnburner barn·burn·er n. Informal An extremely impressive event or successful outcome: "September will not be any barnburner [for car sales]" , "Short Ride in a Fast Machine." Two minutes into this thing and I felt like I was back on Northern California's coastal Highway I in my 350Z. It's very exhilarating (the music and the Z), with Alsop's conducting the Bournemouth Symphony with all stops open. This high-octane piece is followed by two downers, "The Wound-Dresser" and "Berceuse elegiaque," both slow and rather gloomy affairs, the former a musical setting for Walt Whitman's poem of the same name. Can't say I enjoyed either work too much, but maybe I was in a bad mood before I started. If I wasn't, these two numbers would have assured it. The main piece of music on the disc is the four-movement Shaker Loops from 1978, which has rightly made Adams famous. "The Loops," writes Adams, "are small melodic fragments whose 'tails,' so to speak, are tied to their 'heads,' creating loops of repeated melodies...." The "Shaker" part of the title derives from Adams' attempt to recreate the feeling of a Shaker religious ceremony as they shake in religious ecstasy and divine meditation. The final movement has always reminded me of the film music of Bernard Hermann, something out of Psycho, for instance. Naxos engineers capture all of the shaking and trembling and pulse of the music, much of it percussive per·cus·sive adj. Of, relating to, or characterized by percussion. per·cus  sive·ly adv. , in one of their very best
recordings. The orchestra is miked fairly closely, producing excellent
definition and impact. Indeed, the immediacy of the recording may not be
appreciated by listeners with systems too bright or too hard, but in a
generally well-balanced system it should prove eventful, to say the
least.
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