A few minutes into a telephone interview, pianist Christopher O'Riley's enthusiasm
for his favorite music overtakes his ability to express it in words. He
heads for a keyboard in his Los Angeles home and begins playing — rattling off
running figures, affecting melodies and melting harmonies, demonstrating to a
writer listening in from 3,000 miles away exactly what excites him so much.
"There's a fair amount of textural complexity to this music," he says, pausing from his playing. "There's a real sense of orchestration here."
O'Riley is not talking about a piece from the traditional classical canon, although as a virtuoso with a broad repertoire, he could be. What has O'Riley worked up on this day, and most days lately, is the music of Radiohead, an English rock band whose hip, cerebral songs he has been transcribing for piano.
So far, O'Riley has arranged about a dozen of the band's songs and has been trying them out before audiences, slipping them onto conventional concert programs as encores and playing them during the intermission of "From the Top," the weekly showcase for young musicians he hosts on U.S. public radio. Both classical musicians and Radiohead enthusiasts have taken note of O'Riley's obsession; his work is drawing notice from concert promoters and it's won him a following via the Internet among rock fans who normally would never set foot in a recital hall.
Many of those fans will no doubt be present on Friday evening, when O'Riley plays his Radiohead arrangements at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, a New York venue known for programming that draws young, adventurous listeners. Although O'Riley was a late addition to the Miller season, his show has nearly sold out. Those who miss the concert can catch O'Riley's performing Radiohead on a CD due out in spring 2003.
The record catalogs are filled with so-called "crossover" projects, many of them of dubious merit. But George Steel, the director of the Miller Theater, says O'Riley's imaginative transcriptions and his passion for the songs sets his work apart. "Radiohead is tremendous music, first off, and they have a tremendous fan base," Steel says. "It's very well-made music and I think it lends itself to all sorts of treatments. It will be exciting to hear what a musician of Chris's caliber can do with it."
Radiohead started life at Oxford University about a decade ago as a
conventional guitar-based band, but it soon evolved a more complex, contrapuntal
sound. And as the band's reputation for well-crafted, moody songs spread, its
appeal began to extend beyond the college crowd to classical musicians and music
students as well. O'Riley, 46, discovered the band about two years ago and
quickly became fascinated.
"It really is the only music I listen to besides stuff that I am working on," he says. "Other than keeping up with the latest new release from someone like András Schiff or the last set of Shostakovich Quartets from the Emersons, Radiohead has been the top of my list as far as listening is concerned for the past couple of years.
"They have a very sophisticated songwriting skill, and I don't think it's a mistake to equate them as The Beatles of the present day in terms of real workmanlike songwriting and radical departures from what is expected from rock 'n' roll."
There is, of course, a long tradition of instrumentalists transcribing popular tunes for use in the concert hall. For O'Riley — who also performs his own piano arrangements of other pieces that he enjoys, such as Piazzolla tangos and the famous "Flower Duet" from Delibes' Lakmé — transcribing Radiohead seemed like a natural thing to do.
When writing transcriptions, O'Riley says he does not set out to reinvent the songs or to weave them into elaborate fantasies in the manner of, say, Liszt. But sometimes creative choices have to be made when transcribing instrumental and vocal textures for the keyboard. In a song such as "Spinning Plates," for example, it's impossible to use the piano to reproduce the sounds generated by the backwards-running tape loops that open the recorded version.
"I start out by trying to find the key to each song," he says. "I'm interested in what makes it singular, what makes it unique. Each one takes on its own character and life. Then, rather than becoming a matter of what to leave out [for the keyboard], it becomes a matter of what to exploit or what to accentuate."
Although O'Riley's project was prompted by his love for Radiohead, he believes the endeavor can help erase some of the barriers that separate audiences: "You are sort of reaching out to a constituency that doesn't know Radiohead and saying, 'here is the music I love.' And kids who come out to hear the Radiohead stuff might also hear Scriabin, which they would never put on at home."
Despite O'Riley's fame as both a radio host and pianist,
one group of people, curiously, has yet to say anything about the Radiohead
transcriptions — the band itself. O'Riley says he has gotten
Radiohead's approval to release his album, but he's gotten no feedback on the
music, despite sending letters and copies of the arrangements to the band:
"Apparently they get enough 50-page scores of Radiohead transcriptions that [my
arrangements] must get relegated to some rabid fan
dustbin."
