Scott Joplin's performance indications tended to be of the negative variety ("Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast."), leaving plenty of room for interpretational divergences among modern pianists. Did he mean "slow," or just not to play it like the trick pianists who held forth in saloons and Police Gazette competitions?
Joplin's own surviving piano rolls don't offer definitive answers, and in any case cannot solve problems like articulation, but they are in the main, even given their mechanical limitations, quite a bit peppier than the
Joplin recordings offered here by Texas-based pianist Benjamin Loeb. These interpretations fall even past the classic discs by
Joshua Rifkin at the slow-and-steady end of the spectrum, treating
Joplin in a very formal way. Loeb's deliberate approach brings out
Joplin's harmonic expertise on the slower numbers, but in a quicker piece like the Rag-Time Dance, track 1, there is very little dance spirit to be found. Occasional light ornamentation does not break the straight-ahead motion. Of course, formality might have been fine with
Joplin, who had operatic and balletic aspirations for his music that history let him realize only imperfectly. But the music seems at times to want to break out of its straitjacket -- as indeed Loeb lets it do, but in a questionable way, with his decision to let the rhythms of the final Stoptime Rag swing slightly, something else
Joplin expressly forbade. Sample the magnificent Gladiolus Rag, track 7, to hear both the advantages and disadvantages of Loeb's approach within a single work. The meditative opening strains, with their daring outline of a major seventh in the right hand, absorb the attention, but the buildup of energy
Joplin intended in the final two strains just doesn't come off. Listeners in search of a bit more energy in
Joplin should check out recordings by Dutch pianist
Guido Nielsen or even, on the Naxos label itself, the unorthodox but lively versions by Alexander Peskanov.