Christopher O'Riley takes his Radiohead piano to Philadelphia

Christopher O'Riley, the classical pianist who put Radiohead on solo piano, plays a programme of his transcriptions at the Perelman Theater in Philadelphia's Kimmel Center on Thursday 6 May. There was the same quality of silence in the room on the Schubert and on 'Exit Music (for a Film),'¹ he tells Tom Moon of The Philadelphia Inquirer, remembering a recital in Frankfurt.

His album of 15 transcriptions, True Love Waits, came out on Sony Classical last June, and the Inquirer calls it a left-field hit. O'Riley works by ear, from the six studio albums and hundreds of live recordings. He wrote each original out note for note, then worked out how to carry the band's layered parts on one piano; theme-and-variations treatments came first, and he dropped them.

He first played Radiohead on From the Top, the public radio show for young classical players he hosts, partly to get round what classical stations would let him play, and listeners wrote in asking who “Mr. Head” was. He met the band when they played Madison Square Garden last October, and Colin Greenwood told him the band were excited about what he was doing.

His recitals often put classical works first and Radiohead after the interval. In Harrisburg on 1 April the first half was Rameau and Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Handel. He tells the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal that in Portland, Oregon, each audience took to the other's music, while at Wesleyan in Connecticut the classical half was merely endured.

Working up pop songs has sharpened his classical playing. He has also arranged R.E.M., Tori Amos and Elliott Smith. When he slowed down Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto, the hardest piece he plays, he found it no harder bar for bar than R.E.M.'s “World Leader Pretend”. The day-job stuff is a lot easier to play now.¹

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