Scott Joplin spent the last years of his life in a Manhattan rooming house, his mind unraveling from the syphilis that would kill him in 1917, trying desperately to interest anyone — publishers, impresarios, anyone — in his opera Treemonisha. Nobody came. The rags had made him famous, briefly, and then the world moved on, and Joplin was left behind by the very ragtime craze he had largely invented. That story of neglect and rediscovery is inseparable from how we hear this music now, which is why a new complete survey carries weight beyond the merely discographic.
Cecile Licad is a pianist of real distinction. Her Chopin can be ravishing, her Schumann searching, her Liszt technically formidable. None of that is in question.
What is in question is whether she has found her way into Joplin’s particular world — and on this two-disc Danacord release, recorded in San Rafael, I’m not convinced she has.
The problem isn’t artistry. It’s something harder to name. Joplin’s rags exist in a kind of suspended equilibrium — the left hand’s steady march against the right hand’s syncopated melody, the tension between European march-and-dance formality and African-American rhythmic insurgency held in perfect, almost miraculous balance. Mess with that equilibrium, even slightly, and the music loses its center of gravity. Licad messes with it constantly. Not drastically — there are no willful eccentricities on the order of Glenn Gould remaking Bach in his own image — but in a thousand small ways, a press here, a slight drag there, a hesitation before a phrase resolution that feels calculated rather than felt. The cumulative effect is a kind of rhythmic unsteadiness, a limping quality that works against the music’s essential buoyancy.
“Solace” tells the tale most clearly. Joplin himself called it “a Mexican serenade,” and it is the most openly lyrical, most openly vulnerable piece in his catalog — slow, almost Chopinesque in its melodic writing, which may be precisely why Licad was drawn to it. But the piece needs a steady, rocking underpinning, a gentle inevitability. Licad’s rubato, applied with what seems like genuine affection, instead makes the music sound provisional, as though she’s not quite sure where it’s going.
Gunther Schuller’s New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble recordings from the early 1970s — those wonderful, slightly eccentric band arrangements — were among the recordings that introduced many of us to this repertoire. Joshua Rifkin’s solo piano recordings for Nonesuch followed, and they remain a benchmark: scholarly, clean, rhythmically anchored without being metronomic, deeply respectful of Joplin’s notated intentions. Rifkin understood something crucial — that Joplin’s own published instructions warned explicitly against playing his rags fast, and that the music’s dignity depends on a certain stateliness. William Bolcom brought more extroversion to his recordings, more jazz-inflected looseness, and it worked because the rhythmic pulse never wavered underneath. Licad’s approach has neither Rifkin’s discipline nor Bolcom’s swing.
The program is generous — twenty rags, from the early “Original Rags” through the late, strange, almost impressionistic “Magnetic Rag” — and Licad’s selections reveal genuine curatorial intelligence. “Heliotrope Bouquet” gets included, which not everyone bothers with; it was co-written with Louis Chauvin, a St. Louis pianist of mythic local reputation who never recorded and died even younger than Joplin. That piece has a particular wistfulness that rewards attention. “Wall Street Rag” and “Stoptime Rag” are welcome too.
The disc closes — unexpectedly, and rather beautifully — with Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece,” a solo piano improvisation from 1958 built on a rocking C major ostinato. It’s a strange programming choice, not obviously connected to anything preceding it, but Licad plays it with a stillness and a natural breath she rarely brings to the Joplin. Something relaxes. You hear what her piano actually sounds like in repose — warm, well-voiced, the bass notes round and unhurried. It makes you wish she’d trusted that quality more throughout.
Her sleeve notes are brief, thoughtful, and — this is not a small thing — genuinely understanding of what Joplin was trying to do and why it mattered. She knows this music. The knowing just doesn’t always reach the keys.
There are better complete Joplin surveys available. This one, whatever its qualities, isn’t the one to reach for first.
