Word: joplin
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That is the plot of one of the great curios in all American opera. Treemonisha was composed by the ragtime genius Scott Joplin. Completed in 1911, it was never staged during his lifetime, nor at all until 1972, early on in the current Joplin revival. Last May it was presented by the Houston Grand Opera, with new orchestrations by Composer Gunther Schuller and choreography by Louis Johnson. So successful was the production, directed by Frank Corsaro, that it has been transported intact to Washing ton's Kennedy Center for a three-week run. Later this month it will open...
...book's epigraph is from Scott Joplin: "Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast..." And it seems like Doctorow's player piano has some brake on it, because Ragtime seems much longer than it is. It goes fast, but the prose is economical and touches such a torch to the imagination that when you go back to look for a ten-page scene it turns out to be a paragraph...
Like ragtime, the jazz form made famous by Scott Joplin, Doctorow's book is a native American fugue, rhythmic, melodic and stately. "It is never right to play ragtime fast," said Joplin, and the same can be said for reading...
...creative talents. "I had to purge myself of the sense of the writer as an intellect," he recalls. The purge has worked. Ragtime is free of the self-consciousness of form that mars most contemporary novels. "It was actually fun to write," says Doctorow, who wryly quotes Scott Joplin: "The scurrilous invention of ragtime is here to stay...
Mahler: Symphony No. 4 in G (Judith Blegen, soprano; Chicago Symphony; James Levine, conductor; RCA, $6.98). There appears to be little that James Levine, 31, cannot do, except perhaps play Scott Joplin on the tuba. The remarkable new music director of the Metropolitan Opera already has several superlative operatic recordings to his credit (notably / Vespri Siciliani on RCA and Joan of Arc on Angel). This version of Mahler's Fourth, a genial pastoral masterpiece, has a flowing line rarely matched in current interpretations and an intimacy that, comes close to Bruno Walter's incomparable recording of the 1940s...