Riffs on rock

Christopher O’Riley is giving his Steinway grand a workout, coaxing it into a thunderous ostinato, a pining melody and a hypnotic, Minimalist web of phrases. His head is down, his fingers move lightly, and the sound leaks out his studio windows into the Hollywood Hills.

Not that his neighbors will be surprised. O’Riley is a classical pianist who, when he isn’t on the international concert and recital circuit, sits at this piano and practices -- every day. On this occasion, though, the subject isn’t the music of Mozart or Beethoven, it’s Greenwood/Greenwood/O’Brien/Selway/Yorke, the collective compositional moniker of the British rock band Radiohead.

On the brink of Tuesday’s CD release of “True Love Waits: Christopher O’Riley Plays Radiohead,” the pianist is demonstrating a few stops along the way in his arduous process of making Radiohead his own, translating its alt-rock sounds into recital repertory, a labor of love or, more precisely, of obsession.

He plays his ruminative take on the band’s moody “Knives Out” and tackles the potent rhythmic force of “Planet Telex.” Pulling out his self-penned notebook of Radiohead arrangements, he points to the mazelike melodic lines and rhythms of “Let Down,” from the band’s “OK Computer” album. As he plays, the music is recognizably Radiohead, but with a twist. If you weren’t a member of the Radiohead cognoscenti, you might guess O’Riley was accessing other sources altogether.

“I wanted to take the material that they set down,” O’Riley says of this song, “and let it ride. I always imagined it as a kind of a Lou Harrison or John Adams kind of thing.” And in fact, the rippling texture of O’Riley’s “Let Down” has a hint of the pulse-driven, lyric eclecticism that marks the work of those two California composers.

“Let Down” isn’t a song the band often performs live, he says. “The one time I heard Radiohead do it [on a bootleg recording done in New York], when they let it stretch out, it went into that mandala feeling, so I figured I was on the right track.”

He swivels on the piano bench with widening eyes. “Some might assume that this is a sort of busman’s holiday for me. Out of the 23 [Radiohead arrangements] that I do, 16 of them are among the hardest pieces I play. It’s not like I’m slumming it.”

Last week, O’Riley played a contemporary work in Orange County with the Pacific Symphony, and he’s scheduled to play Mozart in San Diego next week. Throughout the summer, he’ll combine his usual soloist-with-the-orchestra gigs and all-Radiohead recitals around the country. (The closest his Radiohead recitals will get to L.A., according to the current schedule, is the Cabrillo Festival in Santa Cruz, in August.)

O’Riley, 47, who was born in Chicago and studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, has withstood the withering exposure of piano competitions (he medaled in the Van Cliburn, Leeds, Busoni and Montreal contests) and he’s used to the critics’ gaze. But he confesses to more than the usual pre-tour jitters when it comes to the Radiohead material.

Most of the reviews aren’t in yet, but he was relieved to see a four-star review for the CD in Rolling Stone. “With unblinking virtuosity,” wrote James Hunter, “he captures the band’s signature contradiction: encountering something exhilarating -- a building, an airport lounge interior -- and feeling simultaneously unwell.”

O’Riley shows off a sidelong grin. “It was never one of my ambitions to get a four-star review in Rolling Stone,” he says, “but I can’t complain.”

Striking similarities

Among Radiohead’s devoted fan base are some musicians who might not otherwise spend a lot of time tuned to rock music. Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau and a string quartet called the Section have expressed their admiration by covering the band’s songs live and on CD. The New Yorker’s classical music writer Alex Ross wrote a long feature on the band after its last big tour in 2001. And Los Angeles Philharmonic music director and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen says that what Radiohead has tried to do musically is “not that drastically different” from what he tries to do.

Like Salonen, O’Riley was lured into the band’s blend of emotionality and experimentalism after hearing 1997’s “OK Computer.” He was nearly a decade out of conservatory, well-launched on his solo career, and a year away from moving his base of operations from New York City to Los Angeles.

Radiohead, he thought, sounded like “the new Beatles.” He got interested enough to research set lists and visit Web sites. Then, in 2000, he became the founding host of NPR’s “From the Top,” which profiles young classical musicians and now airs on more than 200 stations (none in L.A., however). Amid the patter, interviews and performances, O’Riley inserts piano interludes. The radio show, which is meant, he says, to make classical music “accessible without talking down to an audience,” became the first venue for his Radiohead arrangements.

O’Riley says airing the arrangements was a way of telling people, “ ‘This is music that I really love. I think it’s beautiful. I think you’ll like it.’ We would get e-mails into the radio program saying, ‘Who is this Mr. Head and where can I get some of his music?’ ”

Next, O’Riley added Radiohead to a segment he did for NPR’s “Performance Today,” along with a little Shostakovich, singer-songwriter Nick Drake and George Harrison. By then, O’Riley was becoming an established part of the Radiohead fan universe, as hundreds of Web sites offered MP3s of his radio arrangements. Soon enough, O’Riley also was engaged in online dialogues about the band. Among the exchanges, he says, were “people saying, ‘Oh, you’re just getting rich off Radiohead’s music.’ I said, ‘Well, let me know when that happens so I can get over having frozen pasta for dinner every night.’ But most people are extraordinarily encouraging.”

So was Sony Classical when he pitched the idea of an album. O’Riley spent most of last summer working up almost two dozen arrangements for the CD, refining ones he’d already started and doing new ones. The band’s music doesn’t exist on scores, so his notations were all done by ear, by listening and re-listening and picking out the parts, the notes, the meter and the rest. He also exercised an arranger’s license, mixing elements within a song or tweaking its structure.

“Coming up with 23 songs in the space of less than a year has been quite something,” he says. “It grew out of the fact that it’s about the only leisure listening stuff that I ever listen to. I try other things and always come back to it.”

And O’Riley has been flying solo. He has never talked to any members of the band, although Sony cleared the project with Radiohead’s management, right down to the size of the typefaces on the cover (the name of the band couldn’t be too big so that the CD wouldn’t be construed as a Radiohead recording).

O’Riley’s 23 arrangements were pared to 15 tracks for the album, and they form a neat primer of the band’s history, with tunes from each of Radiohead’s five studio albums from the past decade. As an added esoteric touch, the title track, “True Love Waits,” is a rare bit of Radioheadiana, a haunting Thom Yorke song accompanied by a single acoustic guitar and available on a live EP the band released in 2001.

O’Riley is aware that “crossover” can be dangerous territory, implying marketing ploys and diluted aesthetics, especially in the classical arena. It “has had a pretty dismal history,” he admits. “Paul McCartney on the one hand and Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony on the other.”

But O’Riley also raises the telling point that much older “art” music succeeded at making use of popular music. “In the Baroque era, you had lots of folk tunes being used as building blocks for major pieces. Mozart and Beethoven would sit down at dinner parties and improvise on popular tunes of the day or things from operettas or what have you. Liszt made grand, virtuoso vehicles out of minor melodies,” he says.

“Things that Mozart and Beethoven did along this line may not stack up against some of their major works, although [Beethoven’s] Diabelli Variations is a good example of making a mountain out of a molehill, really an innocuous melody and my favorite of his piano pieces.”

It’s in the texture

O’Riley’s mantra is cribbed from Duke Ellington by way of Gunther Schuller, composer, conductor and onetime president of the New England Conservatory. O’Riley says that when he was in school, Schuller reminded him of “an adage that I think about all the time, that’s a Duke Ellington quote: ‘There are only two kinds of music, good and bad.’ That puts the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the performer -- if you believe in it, it’s up to you to make it happen for an audience.”

So what color, shape and size are the classical building blocks that O’Riley has carved out of Radiohead?

What makes the music worthy, he says, “is a complexity and an interest in texture. It’s not chord, chord, chord, with melody on top. They’re not virtuoso guitarists, by any means, but each one of them is contributing a certain line or layer of the texture that makes up the whole, which makes each part integral and makes the whole thing quite an unusual confluence of elements. That’s been [in] their music since the beginning. It’s always been a few instruments and a few lines, rather than just one. Whether they’re playing synthesizer, ondes martenot [the early electronic keyboard championed by Messiaen], guitar or glockenspiel, they all contribute. That makes it interesting, first of all, for me as a pianist, because that means I have more elements with which to work. I can think of the piano orchestrally and make all those elements cohere in some sort of an attractive way.”

At the piano, O’Riley illustrates the process by playing an intricate, rumbling left-hand part -- an arpeggiated strum -- and the base for his version of “Thinking About You,” from the band’s first album, “Pablo Honey.” Stopping mid-riff, he says, “This actually gave me courage to do some of the other songs, because this ostinato [gives] you the energy of the guitar without hammering away, Jerry Lee Lewis-style. It gives it that rolling feeling.”

In O’Riley’s hands, the complex repeated phrase also has the feeling of a musical merger, in which an accomplished classical pianist’s refined touch and musicality add sophistication to pop music, even if it already strains to move beyond pop simplicity. The worlds collide in interesting ways.

“It happens that people will be playing my stuff for their parents,” O’Riley says, “and they’ll say, ‘Gosh, I thought I knew all of Debussy’s music,’ but it’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien.’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s Radiohead? I really like that.’ Somebody said that one piece reminded him of a Chopin prelude. Those things can’t help but happen, because that’s the shape of my hands now, over the course of decades.”

At the other end of the spectrum, O’Riley is reaching listeners ripe for the classical realm.

“The rock kids are now asking me for recommendations,” he says, happily. “They’re ready to go, ready to check things out. I get e-mails from kids saying, ‘I really like the record. I notice on your calendar that you’re doing a Mozart concerto soon. I’d really like to hear that.’ It’s like now they have a friend in the business.”