Joshua Rifkin: Time for More Than Ragtime

Pianist-conductor Joshua Rifkin is a man of many passions, a specialist with multiple specialties.

Though best known in the United States as a champion of ragtime composer Scott Joplin (whose music he plays Saturday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre), European audiences know him best for his controversial interpretations of Bach choral pieces and performances with his Bach Ensemble.

Rifkin also performs 20th century classical music--he has a special love of Stravinsky--and does Baroque concerts as well. His last recorded album featured him playing Brazilian tangos as well as ragtime.

Longtime fans remember his 1965 Elektra recording, “The Baroque Beatles Book,” not to mention his work with the Even Dozen Jug Band folk group and singer Judy Collins, for whom he arranged the “Wildflowers” album, which included her biggest hit, “Both Sides Now.”

In a phone conversation from his home in Cambridge, Mass., the 51-year-old Rifkin gives an answer much like the title of Collins’ song when asked if it’s been a blessing or a curse to have such wide interests.

“It’s a bit of both. I myself don’t feel that’s it’s so many things to be interested in. After all, it’s the same person who’s interested in them, myself, and I’m always the same. In my case, it looks like [my interests] are so various because the things themselves seem to lie at some distance to each other.”

How Rifkin, who studied classical music at Juilliard and composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany, came to the music of Joplin, the Texas-born African American who died in 1917, is another two-sided story.

“I discovered Joplin when I was not yet in my teens through the mediation of an older brother, a great devotee of early jazz,” he said. “That interest in early jazz also included ragtime, so I had an acquaintance with several of Joplin’s rags by the age of 10 or 11.

“My interest was rekindled some years later by two friends who came through the classical field. One, [pianist] William Bolcom, with whom I used to do concerts in the ‘60s, was a very passionate fan, and his passion quickly rekindled my own.”

Beginning in 1970, Rifkin released three volumes of “Piano Rags by Scott Joplin.” Interest in the music soared, aided by the 1973 Robert Redford-Paul Newman movie “The Sting,” which prominently featured Joplin’s music. Rifkin’s reputation as a specialist in Joplin was secure.

Rifkin takes exception to the popular notion of ragtime as fast-played, fancy-free music. When reviewing Susan Curtis’ biography “Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin” for the Washington Times in 1994, Rifkin offered this description of the music: “ebullient and introverted, brash and melancholic, never predictable, but always elegant.”

“Certainly melancholia is a central element,” said Rifkin, “and it’s deeply felt. But the feeling is conveyed with reserve, through a medium that would seem more superficially up, and I guess ‘up’ would be in quotation marks.”

*

Rifkin says it both is and isn’t a mistake to see Joplin’s work as something less serious than music from the European classical tradition.

“Twenty years ago, I would have spoken up strongly from the point of view that he is a classical composer,” he said. “I still strongly support that view but think the categories matter all the less.

“Joplin was a classical composer in the sense that the music was written, very carefully made, very refined by someone with a large sense of craft,” he said. “But the language in which he wrote was largely a vernacular language. I think his music bridges both musical spheres.

“My current view is that whatever slot the music is put in is less important than that people hear it and respond to its message. It is important that people hear it in the same way they hear Mozart, Chopin or Stravinsky, that the music speaks to them and moves them.”

Rifkin has a reputation for de-emphasizing the familiar, raggy syncopation of Joplin’s music when he plays. Instead, he follows Joplin’s original notation, an interpretation that, though still rhythmically alive, better conveys the composer’s intent. Central to this notion is Joplin’s request that his music not be played fast, something modern interpreters often overlook.

“Any performance that rides roughshod over the melody rides roughshod over the music. Joplin must be tempered with a very delicate balance to let its emotions come through. Music always has to move, but it has to dance; it has to have a lilting spaciousness for its introspection. You have to give it its time.”

The introspection and emotion he finds in Joplin’s music is a product of its composer’s life and the times in which he lived.

“This is an experience, like any good art, with many different layers in it. Increasingly, I grow more able to see that this is the product of a black experience of the times, living in two different white and black worlds that were very complex and contradictory. That kind of experience that Joplin had to live is much of what creates the special emotional color of his music.”

Rifkin continues to explore all sides of his musical specialties, with the possible exception of folk music. (“I’ve moved on, but continue to care deeply about it.”)

A new album of Bach cantatas is due later this year, as are scheduled performances of music from Bernstein, Copland and Gershwin.

The day before his appearance playing Joplin in Irvine, he’ll be in Mexico City conducting a chamber orchestra in a program that includes Mozart and Strauss. The walls between different styles of music, he says, are falling.

“I do think the barriers are much lower, much more porous than they used to be. And whatever barriers existed did not so much exist between musicians. I’ve never met a musician who didn’t recognize excellent musicianship of someone in another field. What binds musicians together is much stronger than whatever might divide them.”

* Who: Joshua Rifkin.

* When: Saturday at 8 p.m.

* Where: Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive.

* Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to the Jamboree Road exit and head south. Turn left onto Campus Drive. The theater is near Pereira Drive and Bridge Road, across from the Marketplace mall.

* Wherewithal: $14-$21.

* Where to call: (714) 854-4646.