Judith Lang Zaimont is primarily known as a composer of "serious" music, with a long career in academia at the Peabody Conservatory and the University of Minnesota, but this album of her "concert rags" shows a lighter side of her work and a strong populist touch. The CD includes works for piano solo, piano duet, piano and flute, and small ensemble. Zaimont's rags don't stretch the form with the harmonic loopiness or outrageous virtuosic demands of
William Albright's or
William Bolcom's, written in the '60s at the beginning of the ragtime revival, but they are inventive, strongly lyrical, and have an easy charm. Zaimont creates a variety of moods, from the relaxed Lazy Beguine to the kinetic Bubble-Up Rag, but more often than not, the pieces tend to be more introspective and slower-paced than classic rags. Serenade, which probably would not technically be classified as a rag, is especially lovely -- lyrical and melancholy with elegiac harmonies. The CD offers three versions of Reflective Rag, for piano, for flute and piano, and for chamber ensemble; the most successful is the solo version, due largely to the composer's swingy, rhythmically fluid performance. Zaimont's ease with the idiom makes her performances the highlights of the album, as well as that of her duet with her sister, Doris L. Kosloff, in Snazzy Sonata. The American Ragtime Ensemble, conducted by David Reffkin, plays his arrangements of two of Zaimont's pieces, but both works are slow, and the performances don't have the lilt to make the music really take off, especially when heard next to the composer's lively playing. The album should be of interest to fans of ragtime, and of the new works generated by the ragtime revival.