category. He did a tour in 1974, which included appearances on BBC Television and a sell-out concert at London's Royal Festival Hall. In 1979, Alan Rich wrote in the magazine New York that by giving artists like Rifkin the opportunity to put Joplin's music on disc, Nonesuch Records "created, almost alone, the Scott Joplin revival." In January 1971, Harold C. Schonberg, music critic at The New York Times, having just heard the Rifkin album, wrote a featured Sunday edition article titled "Scholars, Get Busy on Scott Joplin!" Schonberg's call to action has been described as the catalyst for classical music scholars, the sort of people Joplin had battled all his life, to conclude that Joplin was a genius. Vera Brodsky Lawrence of the New York Public Library published a two-volume set of Joplin works in June 1971, titled The Collected Works of Scott Joplin, stimulating a wider interest in the performance of Joplin's music. In mid-February 1973 under the direction of Gunther Schuller, the New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble recorded an album of Joplin's rags taken from the period collection Standard High-Class Rags titled Joplin: The Red Back Book. The album won a Grammy Award as Best Chamber Music Performance in that year and became Billboard magazine's Top Classical Album of 1974. The group subsequently recorded two more albums for Golden Crest Records: More Scott Joplin Rags in 1974 and The Road From Rags To Jazz in 1975. In 1973, film producer George Roy Hill contacted Schuller and Rifkin separately, asking both men to write the score for a film project he was working on: The Sting. Both men turned down the request because of previous commitments. Instead Hill found Marvin Hamlisch available and brought him into the project as composer. Hamlisch lightly adapted Joplin's music for The Sting, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score and Adaptation on April 2, 1974. His version of "The Entertainer" reached number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the American Top 40 music chart on May 18, 1974, prompting The New York Times to write, "The whole nation has begun to take notice." Because of the film and its score, Joplin's work became appreciated in both the popular and classical music world, becoming (in the words of music magazine Record World) the "classical phenomenon of the decade." Rifkin later said of the film soundtrack that Hamlisch lifted