![]() ![]() It was all delightful for us (playing these new-old pieces in concert elicited warm responses from audiences), but I think we all felt the real impetus from our picking up a dropped thread of our emerging American tradition. Bill Albright and I would send each other rags by mail like chess problems. What may be less well known is that from about 1968 on a whole group of young American composers, Peter Winkler, William Albright and several others, joined me in writing new traditional style rags. Soon after, Joshua Rifkin recorded the Joplin rags and Gunther Schuller laid the period instrumentations of Joplin onto disc Joplin's obscurity would be no more. From this happy event came an exploration of Joplin's rags (courtesy of Rudi's friend Max Morath) as well as the whole field of turn-of-the last-century piano ragtime. Shall I bring it next week?" I almost fell off my chair. ![]() ![]() When he said, "I have a copy of the vocal score. That is, until I asked my colleague Rudi Blesh at Queens College we had barely ever said hello before as we rushed in and out of the same office on the way to teaching, but one week I asked him if he knew where I could find a copy of the opera, as all the usual suspects had nothing. For some reason I immediately went on the trail of Treemonisha, only to find that no one even at the Library of Congress, Lincoln Center, or the Schomburg Collection had it. Who is that? I asked - few people in 1967 knew the name Scott Joplin - and Norman told me Joplin was the composer of the "Maple Leaf Rag' but that his opera existed only in legend. Bolcom tells this story: "One day in the fall of 1967 I had lunch with Norman Lloyd, then head of the music division for the Rockefeller Foundation, who mentioned having heard of a ragtime opera by Scott Joplin. It is dotted with markings like ‘brutal’ and ‘loutish' and one just wants to shout "play it all again" at the end.Go Back > Bolcom's modern rags collected together for the first time! What a pleasure it is for Albany to be able to bring these wonderful pieces to the musical public. Hamelin dazzles and sparkles, never more so than in the final rag Brass Knuckles, written with William Albright. In the notes, Bolcom writes that he is convinced that Contentment written in 2015 and dedicated to Joan Morris, who has brought so much joy and contentment for nearly fifty years of songs and marriage, will be his last rag. Hamelin’s proficiency at the piano and Bolcom’s brilliance as a composer fuse together to provide a disc with different emotions the primary one, joy, creating a smile. Whether the wonderful pauses in Tabby Cat Walk, the fast moving Poltergeist or Brooklyn Dodge, written in the mould of the great stride pianist James P Johnson, Hamelin keeps the rhythmic pace alive. He manages the compositional technicalities with panache never failing to convey the message. The different pieces have a voice which Hamelin communicates brilliantly through his virtuosic playing. With a nod to the master of the genre, Scott Joplin, Bolcom creates different moods, of which, the central one, is humour. One could be in a cinema watching the antics of the Keystone Cops or a romantic scene, being interpreted by a lone pianist accompanying the film perhaps dancing a Charleston or tango. ![]() Through syncopated rhythms that dominated popular American culture at the end of the 19th century along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, he plays William Bolcom’s series of rags dating from his first, Glad Rag in 1967, to perhaps his last in 2015. Marc-André Hamelin provides an opportunity to momentarily forget the woes of the world with a fun-filled, entertaining album celebrating the high-spirited world of ragtime. ![]()
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