This ragtime is impossible to overlook! For all that, Scott Joplin’s music was largely forgotten for a long time after his death in 1917, until 1970, when the young pianist and musicologist Joshua Rifkin set off a veritable Joplin renaissance with his recording “Piano Rags”. Thanks to the film score for the crime caper “The Sting”, Joplin’s ragtime pieces have become world-famous and are greatly loved by pianists of all ages and playing levels. It is therefore hard to imagine a more suitable editor than Rifkin for the first critical Urtext edition of Scott Joplin’s piano music, which as a significant contribution to American music history finds its rightful place in the Henle catalogue. This practical and affordable individual edition of the “Maple Leaf Rag” – an effective ragtime of medium difficulty – offers a small foretaste of the volume containing all of Joplin’s piano works.
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