I thought the guy was basically commonplace, what with The Sting and all.
I posted about him in another thread in this forum. I like the recordings by Richard Zimmerman the most, though the piano has this harsh sound.
Again tempo would be brought up here. Come on, stop flaming on tempo questions. They’re essential to the character of the music.
My issue is that ragtime players occasionally play Joplin at very slow speeds. Not that the pieces sound bad that way, but it was a bit of a revealation to me after finding out several of his gems were marked Quarter to 100. At that tempo, they tend to sound more like “party music” than serious concert music. I wouldn’t like all the rags at that speed, though I am fine with the livelier ones played that way, so that there is more " drive".
Check out the one by Claudio Arrau. The music tells a story in itself, a sad lonely but bittersweet story with a sense of spiritual acceptance in the end.
I have my own fanfic in my head on the origins of that piece, and its relation to its original predecessor the Etudes in 12 Exercises no. 9.
Ehh there really isn’t much jazz about Joplin tbh. People just dis-associate him from the classical community because of his colour.
I mean, this is the guy who worked on writing 2 operas, a symphony, and a piano concerto. The story behind his struggle to surpass the constraints of ragtime is interesting. I wanted the movie of him but can no longer access it I’m afraid. It had Lando Calrissian in it.
Oscar Peterson: this guy had some huge sped up sumo wrestler power on the piano. I tend to consider his technique as having more power than Tatum. It’s worth noting that he was tutored by one of Liszt’s “descendants”, so there is something of that overt “Lisztian” showmanship in his playing that seems absent in Tatum imho. Almost as if, if Hamelin was Tatum, Peterson would be Cziffra.
I think I’m at a junction at the moment. Only six months ago I would still have tipped in favour of Beethoven, but Bach has just kept growing on me ever since 2011. There is something universal about his music, and once the 3D image begins to emerge from the polyphony as it were he takes you to a remote and exotic time I still haven’t gotten used to visiting. I think why it took me so long to fully appreciate him was partly that I spent far too much time on the WTC, which is art in the form of little logical puzzles of sort. I mean I love them, but they’re without the vistas opening up in his larger works.
It’s primarily concert experiences which have begun to lift him. The big turning point was when I heard Sokolov play Book II of the Klavierübung in 2011, and was completely dazed afterwards. That’s the first time I really saw the 17th century through his music, which I only knew from architecture, history and the visual arts earlier. Then in 2014 I found myself at a concert which opened with his first orchestral suite, which was magical. There is something about strings which simply doesn’t come across through recordings, I was equally startled the first time I heard Bartok’s 2nd PC live. It gives you an ancient, eternal vibe when you have it in front of you. Then finally I landed a job to record Bach’s complete organ works across ~15 concerts with Sweden’s foremost organist in 2014/2015, which turned me on to a lot of those works too I had only heard in poor performances earlier (this is brusque but honestly, 95% of all organists are advanced church musicians or failed pianists - I think it’s hard to find even decent interpreters).
It’s a different thing to have experienced these live, but I’d be happy to upload if you’d like to hear either of these yourself (I record everything).