Master pianist Marc-André Hamelin seems to call up several musicians on this album full of ‘rags’ ★★★★☆

The Canadian master pianist Marc-André Hamelin makes so many albums that it is difficult to keep up, in repertoire ranging from Haydn to Morton Feldman. He has a preference for the underexposed and the almost unplayable. Take the pieces by Leopold Godowsky, who ‘compressed’ Chopin’s already extremely difficult études in such a way that you only have to play them with the left hand – baby, for Hamelin.

We had barely finished his January album with sonatas and rondos by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and now there is already a new double album, dedicated to William Bolcom’s ‘rags’.

Anyone who has never heard of this composer and who plays the music will blink when he sees that Bolcom was born in 1938, because most of the pieces could have been written in 1900, the heyday of ragtime. At the end of the sixties there was a revival of the danceable syncopated genre, one of the sources of jazz. Composers rediscovered the music of African-American ragtime pioneer Scott Joplin, saw it as an über-American art form and started writing in Joplin’s style.

This was also the case for Bolcom, who had previously mainly focused on atonal music. The composers sent their piano rags to each other by post. While most of Bolcom’s colleagues had pretty much seen it after 1975, he continued to make them, between operas and song cycles. The youngest in the collection recorded by Hamelin dates from 2015.

It’s music from someone who knows very well what he’s doing, and in the best cases, no two bars are alike. What a luxury to hear, in a genre mainly associated with bar pianists, someone who can get so much out of the piano, who can swing without losing his pianistic finesse. Hear him in Eubie’s Luckey Day: his hand independence allows him to conjure up a group of several musicians. Whoever plays them all in succession gets a little too much of a good thing, but there are some delicious pieces in between.