A Key Player

Ask Christopher O’Riley, recently relocated to L.A. from New York, why he moved and this thoughtful and individual American pianist goes all Hollywood. “Love,” he replies simply. “My fiancee is an actress and writer, and she has lived out here. She needs to be here for her career, while I’m pretty good anywhere as long as there is a decent airport nearby.”

O’Riley will certainly get to know LAX well this season. Aside from his recital this afternoon at Pepperdine University in Malibu, his only other upcoming local appearance will be a stop in Santa Barbara while touring a duo program with flutist James Galway in the spring. He played a Mozart concerto with the Pacific Symphony at Irvine Meadows this summer, but otherwise his new hometown has not provided any of the dates on this artist’s calendar.

Still, L.A. has been keeping him occupied, somewhat to his surprise.

“I imagined not having any will to work,” O’Riley says. “How can you have any ambition where there’s orange trees and sunshine all the time? Having lived in New York, where there’s nothing but ambition, I didn’t think anybody could be serious out here. But I was wrong--there are lots of interesting people in this town.”

Not that O’Riley didn’t try to realize his sunshine-and-orange-tree fantasy. He is speaking from a sunny, multi-decked house far off the boulevard in Topanga Canyon. All it needs is the cast of “Baywatch” trooping by to complete the stereotype. That house has, however, been sold out from under O’Riley, who is moving next month to a place in the Hollywood Hills.

“It’s not any bigger than a New York apartment,” O’Riley says with a sigh, “but they expect you to be grateful for it.”

It will have room for his piano however. Raised in Chicago, O’Riley, 41, toyed with the instrument as a child but began formal training only after entering grade school.

“My father was tone-deaf,” O’Riley says. “I can vouch for that, having stood next to him in church many times. But he played the piano anyway--that’s the nice thing about the piano, that you don’t have to struggle with intonation--and he had lots of records. My mother taught me to read early, and that made me a little bored and difficult in school. The principal told my parents that something would have to be done, and suggested either sports or music lessons.

“I remember my first piano lesson very clearly. Everything about the system, the keys and the notation made immediate sense. In junior high school, I realized that being a piano player by itself wasn’t impressing anybody, so I started a little rock band. But even when I was trying to be popular I was always on the fringe. So it was art rock then, and in high school it was fusion jazz.

“I went to the New England Conservatory because they had a very nonexclusive idea of what music was all about. I was there in the days of [“third wave” composer] Gunther Schuller, who was always a great influence, and my master teacher was Russell Sherman.”

After conservatory, O’Riley entered the almost obligatory young musicians’ apprenticeship system, including the competition circuit. He was a finalist at the 1981 Van Cliburn Competition and took prizes at the Leeds, Busoni and Montreal competitions, plus an Avery Fisher Career Grant and an Andrew Wolf Memorial Chamber Music Prize.

Not surprisingly, he has strong ideas about the way young artists are groomed and managed.

“Competitions were more important when I was going through them, 16, 17 years ago,” he says. “They gave you a great arena before an audience and a proving ground before professionals. Now, many have become freak shows, looking for the next ‘Rain Man’ playing Rach 3, and we have concert managers raiding child-care centers for the next prodigy.”

O’Riley is certainly not one of those competition wonders who blaze brightly but briefly. He has built a steady and multifaceted concert career that now absorbs all of his time. “One of the most interesting and distinguished pianists of his generation,” as critic Philip Kennicott described him in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch review, “a musician with a wide-ranging taste in repertoire and an always thoughtful and stylish approach to the diverse music he undertakes.”

O’Riley carries about a dozen different concertos with him each year. This season he’ll bring those concertos to orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic and the St. Louis Symphony. The new projects that he is most excited about, however, are a two-piano program of Astor Piazzolla and “other Argentinean stuff” that he will do with Pablo Ziegler and take to festivals, and a new Public Radio International show that he will host called “Young Performance.”

“This will be a program out of Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory,” O’Riley reports. “ We’ll have sub-18-year-olds in classical and jazz play and talk informally. They’ll be kids, but not necessarily prodigies--kids who are soccer stars and get good grades. I want to remove the feeling of exclusivity from this music, show this as a part of normal life.”

O’Riley has further explored his interest in Argentine music in a forthcoming recording with cellist Carter Brey on Helicon. Other recent recordings include solo discs devoted to Busoni and Stravinsky--much of it in O’Riley’s own editions--and French duos with James Galway. He’s also premiered and recorded an imposing list of contemporary American minimalist and neo-romantic works.

He finds, however, that live recitals offer the most rewarding challenges.

“I usually do what I like,” he says, “but programming is an art unto itself. The chemistry between pieces is what piano recitals should be all about. For example, I’ve done a program where I mixed Chopin and Scriabin for the first half, but with the Chopin pieces moving from dark to light, beginning with the most dour mazurka, and going the other way with the Scriabin, ending with the dark Sonata No. 10.

“You can’t do that sort of thing on a recording, because it winds up in the ‘Piano Miscellaneous’ bins and dies a horrible death. You can only do it in recital.”

For his Pepperdine program, O’Riley has chosen a sequence of preludes and fugues by Bach (from “The Well-Tempered Clavier”) and Shostakovich (from Opus 87) for the first half, and the Chopin Etudes, Opus 25, for the second half.

“The Bach and Shostakovich are a natural match,” he says. “Everyone knows--or thinks he knows--the Bach, but the Shostakovich set is one of the most important piano works of the 20th century. People respond with great enthusiasm and interest, fugue being at the same time the most democratic of genres--each voice is absolutely equal--and the most exclusive, in that you can count on one hand the composers who have triumphed in it.”

O’Riley compares the form of a program to the architecture of a classical sonata, or what he calls “the whole Earth theory of music.”

“The first movement of a sonata represents the intellect, the slow movement is usually the heart or soul, and the rondo finale is the dancing feet--head-heart-body,” O’Riley says. “Here the first half is more cerebral, the second half more in the dancing, sensual vein.”

And where is the heart?

“Well, the seventh etude is the most soulful,” O’Riley muses, “and all the slow ones have a lot of bel canto to them, although I am starting to get more of that also into the fast ones. But this program, I’d say the heart runs throughout it.”

* CHRISTOPHER O’RILEY, Raitt Concert Hall, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu. Date: today, 2 p.m. Price: $15. Phone: (310) 456-4522.