The Underworld, Murder, and Some Ragtime

It’s pure coincidence that both the editor of Compass and I visited lovely Seattle in the past couple of weeks. I didn’t sample the truffles, nor what are reputedly the best root beer floats in the world at the delightfully old-style Kenyon Hall in West Seattle. This is where I gave a concert of ragtime as part of an evening with author Larry Karp, who has written a series of murder mysteries focusing on Scott Joplin.

The first in the trilogy follows the adventures of young Brun Campbell, a young ragtime pianist from Oklahoma, who comes to Sedalia in Missouri to take piano lessons from Joplin.

Karp whose first profession was physician, has a string of other books to his credit, and in this one, “The Ragtime Kid� (Poisoned Pen Press, 2008), he’s done a remarkable job of bringing the lively milieu of the ragtime era to the page. Campbell is a likable hero who runs away from home at age 15 to meet his idol, and on his first night in Sedalia literally trips over the body of a young woman. A money clip with a tiny music box lies nearby, and soon Brun discovers it belonged to Joplin.

Thoroughly researched, this book is teeming with detail about commerce, bordello life, race relations and the music publishing industry, all of which fueled this invented plot. “The Ragtime Kid� is a real page turner that sent me back to my collection of Joplin’s rags to refresh my memory about the individual pieces that figure in the story.

Joplin’s career is truly fascinating, and although it ends unhappily with a mental and physical decline, the first part of his life is an important part of American musical history. “The Maple Leaf Rag� (1899) was the first piece of sheet music to sell over a million copies and established Joplin as a major composer who shunned the slapdash works that permeated the music industry of the time and strove to create an American equivalent of the salon music of Chopin and Schubert. Karp’s sequel, “The King of Ragtime,� follows Joplin to New York where he becomes implicated in a murder in Irving Berlin’s office. I am looking forward to the final volume.

Between gigs out there I went to the Metropolitan Opera’s HD satellite broadcast of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice.� Stephanie Blythe sang the role of Orfeo to perfection, her rich contralto at ease throughout the wide vocal range, originally written for castrato. Soprano Danielle de Niese was an alluring Euridice and after a somewhat tentative beginning (well, she’s supposed to be dead, so perhaps it takes a while to recover one’s full capacity), she soared and joined her partner in a stunning duet, matched in delicacy by the playing of the Met orchestra conducted by James Levine.

Mark Morris’s choreography is well worth seeing, and Isaac Mizrahi’s costumes, particularly for the chorus, created a complete cross section of humanity from Jimi Hendrix to Abraham Lincoln and Genghis Khan.

There is one more performance left this season, on Saturday Jan. 31, 8 p.m., at the Met in New York City.