Critics divide over Christopher O'Riley's Radiohead piano album

Christopher O'Riley's True Love Waits, 15 Radiohead songs arranged for solo piano, has been in American shops since 10 June, and the reviews have split over whether he makes new music from the songs or simply plays them prettily.

The record began on the radio. O'Riley hosts From the Top, the NPR programme for gifted teenage classical musicians, made in Boston, and when he played his Radiohead arrangements on it, hundreds of listeners e-mailed to ask who “Mr Head” was and where his music could be found. He told that story to the Buenos Aires daily Página/12 before the record's Argentine release on 22 July, calling himself a Radiohead fanatic and Kid A the band's most complete album. The San Francisco Chronicle got the short version. Radiohead is the only music I listen to. Period.²

He won't have the record called crossover. He sets it beside Liszt turning Hungarian folk songs into piano fantasies and Bartók building pieces on the folk tunes he recorded, says Beethoven at a party would have improvised on the popular songs of his day, and calls the album his “Radiohead Rhapsodies”. Some suspicion of crossover is fair, he allows, and Pat Boone singing “Stairway to Heaven” is the calculated kind.

Caroline Sullivan, in the Guardian, recommended it to people who would like Radiohead were it not for Thom Yorke's voice.

The warmest notice is Tim Pfaff's in the Bay Area Reporter, which calls it new music drawn from the songs, in the line of Liszt's reminiscences on other composers, and puts the last four tracks, from “Fake Plastic Trees” to “Motion Picture Soundtrack”, beside late Brahms and early Bill Evans. O'Riley tells him “Thinking About You” is now the hardest music in his repertoire.

Billboard was against it. It set O'Riley, tied to his written transcriptions and drifting towards new age, beside Brad Mehldau, the jazz pianist who got to Radiohead's songs first and improvises on them as he would on Gershwin. Uncut this week calls it a curiosity and no more. The guitar noise of “Airbag” and “Subterranean Homesick Alien” translates clumsily, and copying Yorke's vocal lines on the keys grates.

Pfaff had expected some fans to find the record too easy on the ear. The ones who have written about it so far like it, he notes, and listeners give Mehldau a freedom with the songs that they deny a classical pianist.

The reviews