From the beginning of his career, Marc-André Hamelin was interested in the music of William Bolcom, an American composer born in 1938. As winner in 1985 of the Piano Competition organized by Carnegie Hall, Hamelin had had the opportunity to record on the New World label a CD for which he had chosen the 12 New Studies (1986) which will earn Bolcom its Pulitzer Prize in 1988. One can imagine that the link between composer and performer has never been distended, which has earned us a formidable CD today. Bolcom admits to being interested in rag times by Scott Joplin from 1967, when the opera Treemonisha resurfaced. Several contemporaries then composed rags. Bolcom was one. He then integrated the substance into other forms of musical creation, then persevered here and there over time, until 2010 and even 2015 (magnificent Contentment). Durations, atmospheres and varied harmonic universes give the disc what it needs variety, even if the genre is codified. And the pianist sparkles.
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