Spencer Myer - William Bolcom: Piano Rags (2017) [Hi-Res]

Tracklist
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01. 3 Ghost Rags: No. 1, The Graceful Ghost Rag
02. 3 Classic Rags: No. 1, Glad Rag
03. Raggin' Rudi
04. Fields of Flowers
05. Epithalamium
06. 3 Ghost Rags: No. 2, The Poltergeist
07. 3 Classic Rags: No. 2, Epitaph for Louis Chauvin
08. The Garden of Eden: I. Old Adam
09. The Garden of Eden: II. The Eternal Feminine
10. The Garden of Eden: III. The Serpent's Kiss
11. The Garden of Eden: IV. Through Eden's Gates
12. Knockout (A Rag)
13. 3 Ghost Rags: No. 3, Dream Shadows
14. 3 Classic Rags: 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.

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