Richard Dowling and the Definitive Joplin

It’s not uncommon that certain musicians who have achieved a degree of renown as interpreters of the classical repertoire dip into other realms of music as a “crossover” lark. Their Popular Music as a Second Language experiments (always stocked in the Classical section of the CD aisle) are usually characterized by an unmistakable potted-palm formality. There’s a rigidity and a plumminess to such efforts, as if Swing itself were held captive within a tight cummerbund. What’s rare is when a concert virtuoso is equally at home in another genre and shines there. Pianist Richard Dowling has delighted listeners for over two decades with Chopin, Ravel, and Beethoven, has published critical performing editions of the works of Maurice Ravel, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, Felix Mendelssohn, George Gershwin, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and is a brilliant and captivating performer of Ragtime. Throughout 2017 he will observe the centenary of the death of Scott Joplin with a landmark series of all-Joplin concerts nationwide, including an unprecedented two-concert cycle of the complete piano works of Joplin in Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall on April 1, 2017, exactly one hundred years to the day Joplin died in New York. [Read: Richard Dowling Plays the Complete Scott Joplin at Carnegie Hall & Why Scott Joplin Still Matters] Captivated by Ragtime Dowling is no slumming dilettante. H