Scott Joplin - Treemonisha (Rick Benjamin)

Information

Composer: Scott Joplin

CD1:

• (01-10) Treemonisha, opera in 3 acts: Act 1
• (11-18) Treemonisha, opera in 3 acts: Act 2

CD2:

• (01-09) Treemonisha, opera in 3 acts: Act 3
• (10-11) Appendices

Anita Johnson; AnnMarie Sandy; Edward Pleasant; Frank Ward, Jr.; Chauncey Parker
Paragon Ragtime Orchestra and Singers
Rick Benjamin, conductor

Date: 2011
Label: New World Records
http://www.newworldrecords.org/album.cgi?album_id=90185&rm=view

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Review

Rescued and reconstructed: Joplin’s only surviving opera

Imagine a parallel universe where the greatest democracy on earth had thought better than to legislate against a fifth of its own people because of their skin colour. Living in Utopia might have allowed Scott Joplin to transcend his typecasting as ‘The Ragtime King’; and just perhaps his 1911 opera Treemonisha might have been cut the understanding and respect it clearly deserves; and just perhaps a new recording would have been unnecessary.

Too many ‘mights’ and ‘perhapses’, I know, but conductor Rick Benjamin’s extraordinary booklet essay about his reconstruction of Treemonisha tells us how Joplin lived his whole life based on little more than a wing and a prayer. This set is the culmination of two decades of research, social anthropology and painstaking forensic reconstruction. And I can’t think of a more worthwhile task – musical archaeology that needed doing – than rescuing Joplin’s sole surviving opera from obscurity and misunderstandings, some well-meaning, others inexplicably stupid and sloppy. Understanding Treemonisha is not just about hearing Joplin’s achievements in the round; it’s about gaining a proper understanding of black culture during that historically nebulous period when jazz was in its baroque infancy.

Benjamin packs nearly 70 pages of densely spaced text (illustrated with evocative sepia photographs, newspaper clips and other period memorabilia) with Treemonisha’s painfully convoluted and troubled history: the frustrations, the productions that never happened, the legal wrangles following Joplin’s death that led to – and you’re not going to believe this – all the original performance materials being casually dumped in the trash can in 1962. Joplin’s purpose was, Benjamin thinks, ‘to blaze the trail for serious black artistry by providing a vehicle for black performers’.

After listening to Benjamin, the failings of Gunther Schuller’s 1975 DG recording become immediately obvious. Schuller’s glutinous orchestration is pitched somewhere between Falstaff and Oklahoma!, with some harmonies discreetly swung ‘jazzwards’ in a desperate attempt to clinch Treemonisha as a proto-Porgy and Bess. Benjamin’s orchestrations, modelled after a smattering of surviving Joplin orchestrations and period orchestral primers, were made for his own 12-piece Paragon Ragtime Orchestra: one instrument to a part, cornets instead of trumpets, authentic antique percussion instruments.

Using cornets in place of trumpets might seem trifling but the subliminal impact of all Benjamin’s attention to various tiny details makes this Treemonisha feel instinctively right. Next to Porgy and Bess, Joplin’s plot – a plantation couple dream about having a child who might teach their community to aspire to better than superstition, and bingo, they find a newborn baby under a tree – is intimate and small-scale. The couple, Zodzetrick and Monisha, express themselves in rootsy, soulful language; clearly Treemonisha was never about the vainglorious spectacle of European ‘grand’ opera. Benjamin’s light-on-its-feet orchestration fits the music: genteel melodic lines swim like fish through pure water.

Voices carry now too, rather than bob along the spray of Schuller’s orchestral tempest. Edward Pleasant and AnnMarie Sandy (Zodzetrick and Monisha) banish operatic pomp; Anita Johnson’s Treemonisha is sincerely felt. The star of the show, though, remains Joplin. For a composer expert in ‘closed form’ – harmonic ambiguity overrode ragtime’s rigid 16-bar phrases to flat-pack the structure into itself – the wonder of Treemonisha is Joplin’s flair for dramatic trajectory, the intensity of thematic development making his writing spring eternal. This is the most important document about the history of American composed music to have appeared in a long, long time.

-- Philip Clark, Gramophone

More reviews:
ClassicsToday  ARTISTIC QUALITY: 10 / SOUND QUALITY: 10
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2012/May12/Joplin_Treemonisha_807202.htm
https://www.allmusic.com/album/scott-joplin-treemonisha-mw0002275070
https://www.amazon.com/Scott-Joplin-Paragon-Ragtime-Orchestra/dp/B005WUOWR0

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Scott Joplin (c. 1867/68 or November 24, 1868 – April 1, 1917) was an African-American composer and pianist. Joplin achieved fame for his ragtime compositions and was dubbed the "King of Ragtime". During his brief career, he wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first, and most popular pieces, the "Maple Leaf Rag", became ragtime's first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag. After Joplin's death, his music waned in popularity as new forms of musical styles emerged, only to be rediscovered and returned to popularity in the 1970s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Joplin

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Rick Benjamin is the founder and conductor of the world-renowned Paragon Ragtime Orchestra. Benjamin has an active career as a pianist and tubist as well as an arranger. Benjamin's interest in ragtime music began in the 1970s when he was eight years old. In 1986 Benjamin decided to form a 14-piece orchestra of fellow Juilliard students to perform the music as it had been originally arranged during the period. In October 2005 Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra premiered his own version of Joplin's opera Treemonisha, and  has recently recorded the opera with new world records.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Benjamin_(conductor)

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