This review of Dick Hyman’s Scott Joplin: The Complete Works for Piano is personally meaningful for me. The very first CD I ever bought, and the one which initiated my lifelong love for Ragtime music, was Scott Joplin: Greatest Hits, containing sixteen tracks gleaned from the aforementioned complete collection. That collection, originally recorded in 1975, has recently been re-released as both a CD box set and digital download.
Included in the set (72 tracks in all) are the piano rags, marches, waltzes, School of Ragtime with Joplin’s didactic remarks narrated by the venerable Eubie Blake, and twelve short Hyman improvisations on Joplin themes; absent are any excerpts from Treemonisha. Tempi are generally fast and energetic; reference the impish upbeatness of Original Rags and the brisk pace of The Chrysanthemum and The Sycamore. Melodies are cleanly articulated and somewhat angular, and octaves are ringing and declarative (e.g. in The Strenuous Life and The Nonpareil). Pregnant pauses in the A section of Lily Queen are very affecting; the grace notes in the D section are played on the beat. Hyman’s legendary technical command is well-illustrated in The Cascades, where the emergence of the C section—an etude in left hand octaves—is volcanic.
