8/6/2023 0 Comments William bolcom ragtime![]() “It starts with a smiling, and then the smile disappears,” the composer suggested. The music loses its optimistic feel, and its energy dissipates into empty, frantic motion. As for “Nowhere Fast,” it’s a work of hectic energy that begins with the string quartet striding confidently forward in C major before being knocked off-kilter by dissonant exclamations from the piano. I am not narcissistic to the point of pushing my own music on people.” He may be being too modest: His website contains a sampling of piano compositions that show wit, invention, and the kind of virtuoso technique for which he has become so well-known. Hamelin avers that he doesn’t “push his music compulsively. I want to leave something, and I want to make a little bit of a dent in people’s appreciation.”Īs for what makes a compelling concert program, Hamelin said that while it can be constructed any number of ways, he generally holds to a model that combines familiar and unfamiliar works, “because I think the unusual piece has a better chance of being understood or appreciated if it’s not surrounded by other less-often heard things.” Sometimes, the unfamiliar work will be one of Hamelin’s own compositions, as at the Rockport performance (“Nowhere Fast,” a piece for piano quintet) and, later in the summer, at a Newport Classical performance with cellist Johannes Moser (Four Perspectives for cello and piano). So it doesn’t matter if I don’t play these things in concert necessarily. “I try to choose what I believe in but which has been left in the dust somehow. “I want to expand the awareness of the repertoire, both for listeners and for the pianists who are going to play these pieces,” he explained. He has only played a few of Bolcom’s rags in concert, and learned the set only to set them down for posterity in the studio. Unlike many musicians, he sees it as almost wholly separate from his concert activities. The idea of “service” is important to understanding Hamelin’s approach to recording. I think that for many people it’s going to be a very, very pleasant discovery.” ![]() So I thought I’d be doing a kind of service recording. “Part of the impulse might have stemmed from the fact that generally in Europe, and even in the UK, these rags are just not very well known, while he’s really one of our major figures. “I don’t know quite what decided me to record all of the rags,” Hamelin said by phone from Prague, where he was playing Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F with the Czech Philharmonic under Keith Lockhart. So it’s striking, even odd, to hear the pianist - who appears at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival on Saturday with the Viano String Quartet - say that he’s not sure exactly why he decided to undertake the project at all. Hamelin was particularly fascinated because the other Bolcom piano music he’d looked at seemed fearsomely complex and avant-garde. But it also featured a couple of rags that Bolcom himself had written, an indication that the form was of more than just historical importance. It featured a few Joplin rags, as well as pieces by Joseph Lamb and James Scott, who together made up the “big three” of ragtime. A few years later, he came across “Heliotrope Bouquet,” an LP featuring the American composer William Bolcom at the piano. Hamelin started learning some of the rags from a popular Dover collection of Joplin’s piano works. ![]() (The resurgence got an extra kick a few years later with the release of the Paul Newman-Robert Redford film “The Sting” and its ragtime-infused soundtrack.) Released in 1970, Rifkin’s recording was credited with sparking a revival of interest in ragtime. Like many music lovers of a certain age, pianist Marc-André Hamelin was introduced to ragtime by pianist Joshua Rifkin’s recording of Scott Joplin rags, which his father bought when Hamelin was young.
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