"True Love Waits: Christopher O'Riley Plays Radiohead"
Radiohead
(arr. O'Riley):
"Everything in Its Right Place"
"Knives Out"
"Black
Star"
"Karma Police"
"Let Down"
"Air Bag"
"Subterranean Homesick
Alien"
"Thinking About You"
"Exit Music (For a
Film)"
"You"
"Bulletproof"
"Fake Plastic Trees"
"I Can't"
"True Love
Waits"
Christopher O'Riley (piano)
Sony Classical
A lot of well-deserved
fuss has been made over the music of Radiohead, an British progressive
rock group in the vein of Pink Floyd. Formed in 1987, Radiohead found some
commercial success in 1993 with its angst-ridden anthem "Creep" (a single from
its debut album, Pablo Honey), but the group did not get the attention of
the wider world — or of classical pianist Christopher O'Riley
— until the 1997 release of its third album, OK Computer. That disc's intricate, tightly woven
structure, coupled with vocalist Thom Yorke's tortured take on alienation, has
led to its general acceptance as a masterpiece of the 1990s regardless of genre.
O'Riley is not the first pianist to recognize Radiohead's genre-crossing potential. Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, for example, has recorded versions of Radiohead's "Exit Music (for a Film)" on his album Back at the Vanguard and a version of "Paranoid Android" on his disc Largo. In these thoughtful covers, Mehldau gets inside the songs and uses them as a point of departure for improvisation.
That spirit of exploration is missing from "True Love Waits," Christopher O'Riley's prosaic collection of Radiohead piano transcriptions, which has spent the summer of 2003 climbing the classical music charts. O'Riley is an ardent fan of the group, and his eagerness to capture Radiohead's music note for note kills its spirit; his often technically dazzling but always uninspiring copies only leave one hungering for the originals. O'Riley pounds out melody lines for dear life while saturating the ear with repeated accompaniment figures, creating a New Age sound in the most pejorative sense of the term.
The tragedy is not that this project was undertaken, but that the thinking
behind it was so limited — if the goal is merely reproduction, the
result can only fall short of the original. Had O'Riley instead put his capable
talent into bolder, more impressionistic interpretations, he could have scored a
real triumph. The lesson here is an old one: if you're going to cover celebrated
material, you have to bring something new to the table.
