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.
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