Been a Scott Joplin kick recently, as a pianist often does. I enjoyed listening to my mother play the rags growing up, and I still do today. But more specifically, I've been into listening to them performed by Joshua Rifkin.
After listening to many rags on Youtube, I found myself gravitating towards this Rifkin character, and the recordings on this album in particular. Turns out it was quite significant historically. I was drawn to it because he isn't rushed in his approach to the music, which I find is the case far too often for my taste in concert pianists.
Rifkin is a professor of music at Boston University, and a quite accomplished pianist and scholar, especially is it pertains to Bach. Turns out he was into Joplin as well, who wasn't quite as widely celebrated at the time. Today, children across suburban America will recognize the tune to "The Entertainer", and start asking their parents for spare change to buy ice cream. Perhaps this is Rifkin's fault.
This album was responsible for a Joplin revival of sorts, even striking high on the Billboard charts in the 70's. He brought Scott Joplin and his music back to the limelight among classical musicians and popular American music at large.
This particular track below is a bit slow and morose for a ragtime piece, but is perhaps my favorite along with the Bethena Waltz, which can also be considered a ballad. The section shortly after 4:00 in this one gives me chills:
And the Bethena Waltz, which while not overtly sad in my opinion, is quite depressing in context. It was written for his deceased wife, and also is truly tragic when put in the context of the other major key, jovial rags:
My mother has informed me that Joplin was quite an accomplished purely classical pianist at the time, and even wrote some symphonies. His work in this regard was largely ignored and tossed aside by the general public, in part due to heavily racist overtones - he wasn't taken seriously as a Black musician. But what he was doing with this ragtime thing was truly novel. It did directly result in the stride piano movement (Art Tatum et al), who in turn directly influenced my favorite pianist, Thelonious Monk.