New York

You have to love Christopher O'Riley. He's a serious classical pianist, and last Friday -- at Columbia University's Miller Theater, site of many classical events -- he played music by his favorite rock band, Radiohead. Though really I should say, as he does, that Radiohead is his obsession. And he's not alone -- ever since 1997, when it broke through with its third album, "OK Computer," Radiohead has been one of the top cult bands in the world. I've heard classical composers rave about its music, and I'd rave myself. Radiohead's songs are lit with hopeful radiance, even while they ache with melancholy; they're made of sounds that tug at you, and make you think.
At Miller, Mr. O'Riley faced an eager audience -- fellow fans who named the songs he played and knew the lyrics when, in quoting some, he forgot a line. He was like an eager kid, happy in a candy store but not certain he belonged there. "All my Chopin etudes have been building up to this," he said.
And the fans loved him. At the end, they stood and shouted. "The way Christopher O'Riley has transcribed [Radiohead's] work is beautiful," said one of them the next day on an Internet message board. "He not only captured the sounds, but the emotion as well [and the] little nuances that make the song . . . one word describes O'Riley's talent: genius." For myself, I'll add that classical music needs to open up to pop. In the past, it blended easily with every sound around it -- street songs, gypsy tunes, you name it. Now it should be just as welcoming, especially since bands like Radiohead themselves are serious art.

But I only wish I'd liked the concert more. Mr. O'Riley painstakingly transcribed some 20 songs for piano, drawing on all five Radiohead albums, one B-side, and a track available only on an imported CD of the band playing live.
But I thought he missed the emotional tone (I'll have to differ with the fan who posted on the message board). To my ear, Radiohead's singer, Thom Yorke, sounds as if he's drenched with pain, regret and longing. Mr. O'Riley didn't capture that, or at least not with any specificity, any sense of how one song differs from another. If you knew the songs by heart, maybe you could read the emotion back into them (or pick up subtler cues than I could hear), but for me the feeling wasn't there. Nor was there any contrast when Mr. O'Riley played songs by George Harrison and by a hypnotic '70s folk singer, Nick Drake. Drake's voice, on his albums, sinks into my bones; the way Mr. O'Riley transmuted it for piano, I couldn't tell it from Thom Yorke's.

And I couldn't recognize the sounds on Radiohead's CDs. Or, to be precise, I couldn't recognize piano equivalents for them. The piano can't easily reproduce -- to cite but one example from "Everything in Its Right Place," the opening song from "Kid A" -- propulsive rhythmic syllables apparently sampled from a singing voice, then squeezed and polished with electronic processing. On the album, the effect is inexpressibly sad, but also poised and conversational. On the piano, it simply wasn't there.
Though to be fair, Mr. O'Riley didn't want it to be there, or to work with any sounds like it, or, as far as I can see, even with the thrust and pulsing of the drums which Radiohead records with vivid resonance. In an interview last week on WNYC, New York's public radio station, he said that he "took harmony as a point of departure." Or as he himself fleshed out that thought, he mostly played complex versions of the chords and melodies he hears. That makes sense to him, because he thinks Radiohead is like the Beatles, whose songs -- no matter what rock sounds are in them -- can be played like smooth pop standards. (You can listen to this interview on the Web, and to another one from NPR. On both, you can hear Mr. O'Riley play Radiohead and draw your own conclusions.)

To me, Mr. O'Riley's approach made him turn the songs into piano music, and in fact into romantic piano music, complete with swirling patterns in the left hand, much as you'd hear in Chopin or Rachmaninoff. So -- to be fair, once more -- I tried to like the concert simply as a piano evening.
But still I had trouble. I'll honor the thought and love that went into this, the hours of transcribing what's on the records, the endless revisions, the painstaking work to find exactly what rhythms Nick Drake sang. And taken individually, some of the songs were lovely, especially "Let Down," from "OK Computer." There, Mr. O'Riley found a winding background guitar line that was strong and fresh enough -- especially as he rewrote it -- to support five minutes of serious listening. But elsewhere he fell back on a single approach, always playing the melody with his right hand and a rolling accompaniment with his left. In Chopin, accompaniments like these take on an independent life; here they seemed anonymous.
There's a CD on the Vitamin label called "Strung Out on OK Computer," the latest in a series of rock transcriptions for a string quartet; for me, it's stronger than what Mr. O'Riley played, because the songs are more imaginatively reinvented. For the best of all classical transcriptions of rock 'n' roll, I'd recommend "The Kennedy Experience," a Sony Classical CD on which Kennedy, the one-named violinist, plays Jimi Hendrix -- with all the flair, noise and edgy rhythm that classical musicians mostly miss.

Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2002