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JOPLIN: THE COMPLETE RAGS - William Albright

JOPLIN: THE COMPLETE RAGS - William Albright

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Maple Leaf Rag
3:07
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Original Rags
4:39
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The Favorite
3:24
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The Easy Winners
4:53
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Peacherine Rag
3:19
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The Entertainer
4:07
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The Strenuous Life
4:31
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A Breeze From Alabama
4:15
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Elite Syncopations
3:28
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Palm Leaf Rag
3:03
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Weeping Willow
4:14
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The Cascades
3:12
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The Sycamore
3:55
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The Chrysanthemum
4:58
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Leola
4:34
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Eugenia
5:01
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The Ragtime Dance
3:49
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Nonpareil (None To Equal)
3:59
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Reflection Rag
4:10
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Gladiolus Rag
4:49
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Searchlight Rag
5:01
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Rose Leaf Rag
4:37
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Pine Apple Rag
3:24
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Sugar Cane
3:45
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Fig Leaf Rag
4:52
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Country Club
4:16
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Paragon Rag
3:30
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Euphonic Sounds
3:02
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Wall Street Rag
4:45
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Solace
6:16
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Stoptime Rag
2:39
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Scott Joplin's New Rag
3:37
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Silver Swan Rag
3:42
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Magnetic Rag
3:40
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The story of Scott Joplin and his ragtime is one of happiness and melancholy restlessness and rootedness, aspirations achieved and hopes dashed. It is the story of a black artist’s struggle to find acceptance and recognition paradoxically in both black and white societies. It is about America's South Midwest and East· it is about opportunities -- and the lack thereof -- for the recently emancipated black people. The story is about European, African, and American music. It is about the international success of one seminal rag piece, about commercial appropriation and personal obscurity, even about the long-overdue about revival of interest in his music and eventual canonization. As Over the fifteen or so years of creative activity represented on this album -- the pieces have been arranged in their approximate chronologic order of writing – we can hear the development of a body of literature as important as any produced by an American composer, as important, say, as Stephen Foster songs, Gershwin theater works, Sousa marches, Copland ballet scores, or Ives sonatas. There is not a weak piece in the lot, and the strongest compare well to the character piano miniatures of European masters, especially those in dance forms. Ragtime -- or ragged time -- is, simply put, a texture created by more or less continual syncopation against a regular beat. Foremost a piano music, ragtime's right hand typically does the ragged rhythm, the left the oom-pah. As such, needs to be understood as a style of playing which could be applied to music of all kinds. Ragtime as written composition is primarily a synthesis of European dance form and harmony with the irregularly accented patterns of African rhythm. Ragtime combines the elegant predictability and symmetries of march, quadrille, and country dance with the excitement of plantation shout, church song, and slave chant. It is this bicultural layering that gives ragtime its novelty and sexiness. Even within his lifetime it was acknowledged that no one composed ragtime with as much finesse and craft as Scott Joplin. He was rightly regarded as the King of Ragtime Writers." But it is also true that much of the quality of his music derives from the depth and range of expression he was able to achieve, a depth and range escaped notice by all but a small handful of fans. And, probably off-putting to most but which we now appreciate as a further sign of Joplin's artistry was his continual experimentation with the conventions of form and content of ragtime.
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The composer and performer William Albright (1944-1998) set down this three CD set of Joplin’s piano music in two sessions separated by a gap of two and a half years. His cycle is urbane in the best sense, and he takes pains to bring out voicings that some other practitioners tend to skate over. He keeps to Joplin’s dictum about playing Rags sedately; he’s certainly no speed merchant. Sometimes he can vary voicings and there are a few detectable transpositions, but in the main he is a loyal exponent of the Joplin muse, and he was indeed a noted and practised exponent on disc and in recital. These three discs attest to his assiduous absorption in the medium. In the first two discs the programme isn’t strictly chronological but it does broadly present a curve from 1899 and Maple Leaf Rag (of course!) to the New Rag of 1912 and finally the 1914 Magnetic Rag. Silver Swan Rag bisects these last two, having been published as late as 1971. In the third disc he goes back over the ground, going right back to The Crush Collision March of 1896 and forward to the co-composition with Scott Hayden of Kismet Rag (1913). He certainly does probe the sense of classisicm that lies within The Favorite, and manages to evoke a saturnine left hand in The Strenuous Life. Pert rhythm informs A Breeze from Alabama, which ends with a chordal flourish. Meanwhile the quasi-operatic measures of Weeping Willow do not go unnoticed, even if it is described as yet another of his Two-Steps. Albright deals very well with the contrast of themes and dynamics in The Chrysanthemum. He is not deaf to the more saucy and pert elements of the writing either – I suppose The Ragtime Dance of 1906 is as good an example as any. Similarly one can appreciate in his performance of a less well known piece such as Searchlight Rag just what someone like Jelly Roll Morton admired in this body of work and how Morton could absorb Rags into his own repertoire. Occasionally things go awry – Pine Apple Rag gets a bit too excitable I feel – but in the main he attends to the tenor and ‘feel’ of each rag judiciously, playing second themes with requisite attention to detail. His crashes in The Crush Collision March are certainly vigorous – they could hardly be anything else – but he also deftly hints at the Chopinesque in Harmony Club Waltz, one of Joplin’s more generic and gestural pieces. The salon roulades and statuesque B section of the Augustan Club Waltz are rather better. March Majestic has its vaudevillian moments, and the ever-lovely Bethena’s minor key tristesse works its accustomed magic. Antoinette is quite stern in this performance.
MusicWeb International
11/29/2024
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William Albright
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Maple Leaf Rag William Albright
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