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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sublime Music, 26 Oct 2005
If you like ragtime , you may just love this.I had only heard Scott Joplin ragtime before I got this and I rate this almost as highly as Joplin. The performance is near perfect. The playing is matter of fact, no histrionics, no excessive speed (or painful sloth) and no ad-libbing to distract from the music as written, which conveys enough emotion by itself. I have heard many different interpretations of the ragtime piano of Joplin, from the speed merchants who make the whole listening experience comic, to painfully slow playing attempting to wring the last drop of emotion from the music. I play piano myself and I have never held the view of some that a single ragtime piece should speed up, slow down, be played fortissimo, piano, legato, staccato all within the same piece just to satisfy the ego of the classical pianist making the recording who feels ragtime is beneath them. The worst ragtime CD I heard was by a (nameless but female) Belgian concert pianist who completely lost the plot - and the plot is that ragtime is not Chopin or Beethoven, it is saloon bar music, born in the whorehouses of the USA and the same criteria cannot be used in playing, interpreting or listening to ragtime as with classical waltzes or nocturnes. Ragtime should be played "as wrote" and as instructed by the composer - usually "not fast". The recording is very good - just a touch of compression on some loud passages. The sleeve notes are exemplary - including a biography of Lamb and, for each piece, a colour facsimile of the front of the sheet music and a description of the piece. My only sadness is that there are not more pieces on the CD.
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~ Scott Joplin
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