Ten years ago pianist Christopher O’Riley needed something to play as filler for the “station identification” breaks during the first season of “From the Top,” the weekly syndicated radio show about young musicians. He started dabbling with piano arrangements of songs by Radio Head, the alternative rock band. His imaginative treatments of the music — ruminative, stirring and colorful — opened up an entirely new career avenue for O’Riley, who performs a program of original arrangements and classical selections on Sunday afternoon at The Egg in Albany.
“There’s a crosspollination of listening in the younger generation of music lovers, with enthusiasms for all kinds of genres. That’s just the norm with them,” says O’Riley, 54. As just one example, he recalls “a Juilliard violinist talking about jazz and what a good he was having with music, where he wasn’t having to dot every i and cross every t.”
Riley says that the original conception of “From the Top” was to highlight young musicians of every stripe, not just classical, but the strict formats of public radio stations made that an unworkable concept. Slipping in pop music, played by the show’s genial host at the piano, seems to be his way of keeping some link to the rest of the musical universe.
It didn’t take that long for O’Riley’s new endeavors to find their way onto disc. The all-Radio Head collection “True Love Waits” was released on Sony in 2003. And as O’Riley has expanded his prevue to include other figures from alternative rock, including Nick Drake and Elliott Smith, the new discs keep coming. His fifth and most recent title, “Out of My Hands,” is the first to feature a variety, with original treatments of Tori Amos, Nirvana, Pink Floyd, R.E.M. and others.
O’Riley has also published a number of his transcriptions — or “reimaginings” as he likes to call them. Two songbooks and a number of PDF downloads are available for purchase through his Web site (http://www.christopheroriley.com).
“They are rather faithful as transcriptions to the form and format of the original material, but aside from that in terms of invoking the technological and instrumental colors there’s a lot of original thought,” he explains. “There are a lot of people buying them but they’re almost impossible to play really.”
While always welcoming recommendations of new pop and rock acts to check out — he’s especially taken by the Lady Gaga video “Bad Romance” — O’Riley has hardly abandoned the classical repertoire. His Sunday afternoon program will be a liberal mixture of material from both sides of his career.
“It’s going to be an amalgam. I’ve got the idea of not formatting the program so strictly and just announcing it all from the stage,” he says. “There will probably be some new arrangements that I’ve come up with in the last few months, and some new classical enthusiasms.” As examples of the later, he cites a current fondness Debussy and Scriabin, the Russian Galina Ustvolskay who died in 2006 and the 39-year old British composer Thomas Ades.
Drawing connections between new and old has become a particular fascination. A series of three concerts last season at Miller Theatre in New York paired rock and classical artists.
One evening featured Shostakovich and Radio Head. “They both mastered the art of irony in music, Shostakovich out of necessity and Radio Head out of desire. In their song “No Surprises,” the lyrics are all suicidal, and it’s juxtaposed against really pretty music, while Shostakovich always has texts and subtexts.” Robert Schumann and Elliott Smith were paired together because of a common mania, while Nick Drake and Debussy just shared a fondness for Paris.
Perhaps even more satisfying to O’Riley than bringing together such extreme types of music has been bringing together different kinds of listeners. Success with that came early in the history of “From the Top.” Recalls the pianist, “My announcer would say, ‘That was Christopher O’Riley playing Radio Head.’ And we would get emails asking, ‘Who is this Mr. Head and how can we get more of his music?’”
(March 4, 2010, Times Union, Albany, NY)
Best known as the host of the radio program “From the Top,” pianist Christopher O’Riley has a distinctive ringing sound at the keyboard and a knack for choosing repertoire that shows off his light, transparent touch. That he’s become a specialist in making and playing transcriptions of alternative rock songs — especially by the band Radio Head — is really just an added cool factor. Like a dancer who ends up doing most of his own choreography, O’Riley knows his strengths so well that he may as well also be the one to set the notes.
This realization came about two-thirds of the way through his Sunday afternoon recital at The Egg in Albany when he played the “Ondine” movement from Ravel’s “Gaspard de la nuit.” Its floating textures were given a shimmering, crystalline elegance — and felt surprisingly similar to much of the other material on the program, whether it was by Nirvana, Pink Floyd or Tori Amos.
A rock song in one of O’Riley’s “re-imaginings,” as he calls them, typically hides the melody amidst a gentle turbulence of hazy, broken chords, a rumbling bass and pearlescent dabs in the treble. Like most rock songs, they have almost no beginning or end but are instead a slice in time from a continuous pulsing wave.
They also appear devilishly tricky to play. Among the most impressive was Radio Head’s “Like Spinning Plates,” which could have been called an etude for the left hand.
Though wrong notes were practically impossible to detect, except for occasional winces on O’Riley’s face, this was no mere improvising. For everything but the Ravel, which was performed by memory, O’Riley read music from the screen of an adapted laptop computer that rested on the grand piano in place of its music stand. He controlled the movement of the images on the screen using a foot control placed to the left of the piano’s pedals.
In a nod to the sound of pop but mostly in compensation for the dry and noisy hall, the piano was amplified and given some extra reverb.
In between a generous sampling of Radio Head came Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box,” Portishead’s “The Rip,” and Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” There was also a movement of Scarlatti, Chopin’s Barcarole, and Thomas Ades’ “Darkness Visible,” a dramatic homage to John Dowland. A voracious consumer of music, O’Riley also included “Here and Now,” by 17-year old Vermont composer Tim Woos, who appeared on “From the Top” just a few weeks ago.
(March 8, 2010,Times Union, Albany, NY)
