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O’Riley rocks the crowd — well, sort of
Pioneer Press published a review of Christopher O’Riley’s Radiohead recital at the Sommerfest Festival as well.
“When you think of the Twin Cities’ hippest hangs for midnight music, Orchestra Hall probably doesn’t pop to mind. But that’s where more than 1,000 casually clad scenesters of Gens X and Y assembled Friday for a late-night piano recital.
But not your grandmother’s typical piano recital. Christopher O’Riley was performing his solo transcriptions of songs by Radiohead, the British band that has been king of the rock critics’ darlings for the past decade. Radiohead’s albums customarily are all over the year-end 10-best lists, thanks to an imaginative brand of anthemic rock rife with brooding lyrics and a melancholy melodic sweet tooth.
It was clear from early in the program that this was a mutual admiration society gathering, and O’Riley proved both an engaging host and an engrossing performer, even if some of Radiohead’s layered rock sometimes seemed too complex to get two hands and 88 keys around.
Rather than take a minimalist approach that would find the lovely melodies inside the songs that Thom Yorke and his bandmates created, O’Riley forced his fingers into a flurry of flourishes up and down the keyboard, sampling a percussively pounding bass line here, a crashing power chord there, and, when at his most astounding, elements of all of the instruments simultaneously.
While it sometimes added up to an experience as exhausting to the ear as a Radiohead album can be, it was nonetheless among the best efforts ever attempted at finding common ground between rock and classical music. For O’Riley’s style is deeply rooted in the classical repertoire he most often performs (such as the Prokofiev and Chopin offered earlier Friday, or the Robert Schumann he plays tonight).
But even the non-Radiohead-savvy who can’t tell “Paranoid Android” from “Fake Plastic Trees” likely came away from Friday night’s concert with the knowledge that they’d witnessed something special. O’Riley’s arrangements and athleticism on the ivories were on a par with the lengthy solo improvisations of Keith Jarrett’s “Koln Concert” prime.
While Jarrett’s career arc has found him moving from jazz to solo work to classical, perhaps O’Riley is headed in the opposite direction. For — when he added a song by the late singer-songwriter Elliott Smith to Friday’s program — one couldn’t help but wonder if Radiohead may be only the first muse that draws O’Riley down a new path. And, while he explores these fresh inspirations, he may prove to be the ideal magnet that classical concert halls need to draw younger audiences.”
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Radiohead News on this day in...
2008: Dan Le Sac: Radiohead Own Our Soul — Radiohead [...]2003: ‘Hail to the Thief’ nominated for Mercury Music Prize — Radiohead’s [...]
