Having said that, let’s break to the chase. Between 1970 and 1974, Bach scholar Joshua Rifkin recorded a series of three LPs on Nonesuch records devoted to Scott Joplin piano rags. All total, Rifkin recorded 24 of Joplin’s published 62 rags*. These recordings, coupled with Marvin Hamlisch's score for the 1973 Oscar-winning movie The Sting, detonated a ragtime revival rivaled only by that of the blues resurgences a decade prior. Rifkin’s Joplin was critically acclaimed and has aged well. Unfortunately, all that is available on compact disc, Scott Joplin Piano Rags is fitted with the Volume 1 LP cover, and contains 17 rags, the eight being a direct transfer from the Volume 1 LP and the remaining gleaned from Volumes 2 and 3.
This is a unfortunate and Nonesuch Records should be ashamed of themselves for not having issued a two-CD set with all of Rifkin’s performances on them. Rifkin’s approach to Joplin sounds like his approach to Bach, which is an exposition of crystalline definition. In 1981, Joshua Rifkin fired a shot across the bow of the period-performance movement with a paper presented at American Musicological Society that not only corrected history, proving that Bach’s St. Matthew Passion premiered 1727 and not the previously thought 1729 but proposed boldly that much of Johann Sebastian Bach's vocal music, including the famous St. Matthew Passion, was performed with only one singer per choral part. Rifkin was unable to finish his presentation because of what was termed “strong audience reaction.” “Strong audience reaction” is classical-speak for a riot. Leave it to a bunch of moldy music intellectuals to treat one of their own like Mussolini after his execution.
Nevertheless, Rifkin’s concept of “less is more” in Bach prevailed and may be heard in his Joplin, which he plays in the same way many Eastern Seaboard scholar’s of rural blues play that particular genre, like peanut butter smoothed to remove the imperfections. Rifkin’s treatment of meter and tempo are straight as Pythagoras and precise as an atomic clock. Rifkin plays sola scriptura to great and educational effect, giving his performances the distinction as being those to which all other are compared. He takes seriously Joplin’s declaration that, "ragtime should never be played fast." This makes listening to every other performance an adventure, one where the listen to different ragtime philosophies and appreciate them all.
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