07
Composer: William Bolcom
Performer: Spencer Myer
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Steinway and Sons
Catalogue: STNS30041
Release: 2017
Size: 2.17 GB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
3 Ghost Rags
01. No. 1. The Graceful Ghost
3 Classic Rags
02. No. 1. Glad Rag
03. Raggin’ Rudi
04. Fields of Flowers
05. Epithalamium
3 Ghost Rags
06. No. 2. The Poltergeist
3 Classic Rags
07. No. 2. Epitaph for Louis Chauvin
The Garden of Eden
08. I. Old Adam
09. II. The Eternal Feminine
10. III. The Serpent’s Kiss
11. IV. Through Eden’s Gates
12. Knockout – A Rag
3 Ghost Rags
13. No. 3. Dream Shadows
3 Classic Rags
14. No. 3. Incineratorag
15. Estela – Rag Latino
16. The Brooklyn Dodge
After ragtime music enjoyed a revival of popularity in the 1960s, American composer William Bolcom contributed some new pieces to the genre. It’s putting things too strongly to say, as the graphics here do, that these works “would organically interweave American popular music cultures into the fabric of concert music for decades to come”; in fact, these delightful pieces are underrepresented in concert and on recordings, and this recording by pianist Spencer Myer is welcome. Myer rightly makes the pieces into concert works, not showboat nostalgia, but he avoids the rhythmically denatured sound of Joshua Rifkin’s Scott Joplin recordings. Bolcom approached classic piano ragtime in a variety of ways. He wrote pieces that approximated the models of Joplin and others (most of these are denoted by the title “Classic Rags,” although these are not mere imitations).
He wrote rags in programmatically related series. He expanded Joplin’s harmonic vocabulary with elements drawn from Chopin and other composers. And, fascinatingly, he wrote pieces with traditional melodic and harmonic material that fool with register and attack as a serialist composer might have. Especially if you have a bit of familiarity with classic ragtime, you might sample Classic Rags “II: Epitaph,” a lovely tribute to Creole composer Louis Chauvin, whose music for the most part was never written down and has been lost. Steinway & Sons, working in the Sono Luminus studios in Virginia, achieves an appropriate acoustic. This is an essential item for ragtime collections, and highly enjoyable for anybody.