True Love Waits: O'Riley Plays Radiohead

Radiohead (Composer), Unspecified (Composer), Christopher O'Riley (Performer)

Product Details

• Performer: Christopher O'Riley
• Composer: Radiohead, Unspecified
• Audio CD (June 10, 2003)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Sony
• ASIN: B00009MGQ4
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #36,172 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Rock bastardizations of classical music are as old as Kim Fowley's--and ELP's--Tchaikovsky tweaking "Nutrocker." But classical interpretations of rock music have generally been something of a high-wire act. While most pop fare has strong melodic foundations for the soloist to build from, Christopher O'Riley has challenged himself here with the catalog of Radiohead, one of modern rock's most acclaimed--and texturally complex--bands. O'Riley's insightful gifts for interpretation (which have previously enlightened everything from Stravinsky to P.D.Q. Bach) produce a hypnotic, emotionally compelling listening experience here; O'Riley is a huge Radiohead fan, and that love courses through everything from the dreamy, bittersweet title track through the brooding loveliness of "Let Down." Radiohead's stock in trade is dense, multi-layered music that leans heavily on electronic processing for its moody sonic atmospherics; O'Riley's evokes those complex textures with but a judicious use of the sustain peddles, a deft use of dissonance (as on "Knives Out"), and a rhythmically anxious left hand. Call them etudes for the post-modern age if you will, but O'Riley's performances here largely achieve what all great interpretations strive for: New insight and enlightenment. --Jerry McCulley

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Revelatory Music from a Superb Artistic "Collaboration", June 29, 2003

By	Paul Frandano (Reston, Va. USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Transcription is a very old, very honorable tradition, particularly among virtuoso musicians - and Christopher O'Riley is surely that. A thought experiment: what must listeners who have never heard of Radiohead make of this music? I find it almost impossible to listen "cold" - Radiohead is my "seminal band of the 1990s" and its music is burned into my brain - but the effort is useful.

As piano pieces, True Love Waits is a very mixed bag. Throughout - and, indeed, in passages of virtually every piece - you will hear what may strike you as New Age Pulse Music - the languid, lovely title song, the pretty Knives Out, even Everything In Its Right Place (although the darkly throbbing chords seem a tad too ominous for Windham Hill). In its repetitive motifs, Let Down almost sounds as though it spiraled out of the Philip Glass songbook.

And some of this music will strike you as squarely within the Elton John-Billy Joel genre of banged out block chords, with O'Riley flooring the "loud pedal" for extra sonic effect. I refer specifically to Black Star, but you can also hear this throughout in most of the forte passages.

Still other time we hear lovely, lyrical moments - in, say, Karma Police or Fake Plastic Trees or Subterranean Homesick Alien (I've always loved that title's Dylan reference) - and sweetly wistful sounds that wouldn't seem inappropriate in a piano bar, tinkling-wafting up from a dark corner out over solitary drinkers hunched around their glasses.

And more than once - for example, during the chorus of I Can't, with its dramatic descending major chords over O'Riley's rumbling, roiling left hand - the thought of the original music itself intruded on my little "experiment" in listening, forcing me to muse on "why it is that every band I've ever loved winds up being transposed into elevator music?" Some of O'Riley's arrangements Liberace would have had a ball with. And I could not help but think of the bombastic drama of 1960s pop writers with orchestral pretensions, like Jimmy Webb (MacArthur Park) and Mason William (Classical Gas), who can be heard piped out of malls and elevators throughout the civilized world.

None of this is by definition "bad." This is simply to say I'm not quite certain this CD would have a market in the classical bin without legions of Radio-heads having already been captured by the beauty of O'Riley's realizations. No, what I am certain of is that this is "good music" - Ellington said, and I paraphrase, "Jazz music? Swing? Bop? No. There's only good music and bad music." O'Riley's True Love Waits is - like all provocative, satisfying art - protean: you listen, again, and again, and hear these pieces differently at different times. This is a good thing.

So now I'm preaching to the choir: for those who already love the music - and who, I presume, will account for 95 percent of the sales - several points are worth making.

O'Riley makes intellectual inroads that some will view as novel. What a well-trained concert pianist does that perhaps you and I cannot is literally inhabit a piece of music. They connect with the arrangement of notes in much the same way a mathematician connects with the abstract nature of a math problem, or a chess master with the dynamic interaction of 32 pieces on 64 squares. I imagine it as a different kind of "sight" - think about when Neo realizes he's "The One" and, all of sudden, perceived the slowed-down, pixilated molecular structure of reality. I can't share such perception, but I can watch and listen for those who give signs of having attained a deeper level. O'Riley is there. Period. He sees, quite clearly, that this music stands as music - even though he's attentive to the ways in which the arrangement of notes also reflect the words of Radiohead's lyrics. O'Riley's judgments, particularly of mood, meter, and dynamics, never seem less than apt: grandiose when grandiosity is called for, majestic when majesty is palpable in the music, quietly reflective in pensive passages, and on and on. He has seen to the very center of this music, has touched its emotional core, and with great artistic sweep and skill communicates this essence.

And unlike a few reviewers who claim to have "learned nothing" from the O'Riley transcriptions, I came away from this CD with an enhanced appreciation of the music's satisfying architecture. The world of composition (in which I include the spontaneous "composition under pressure" of jazz improvisation) divides into those who are relatively good architects - who build pieces logically, coherently, with effective repeats and other musical devices, and create a satisfying sense of the whole and of closure - and those who simply cannot pull the "architectonic thing" off with consistency. For all the asymmetries of their music, Thom-Colin-Jonny-Ed-Phil are brilliant architects. The new Hail to the Chief has example after example of sounds meticulously structured and arranged for a total harmonic-melodic-rhythmic effect that is unlike anything in popular music. O'Riley captures these dimensions - indeed, he says he was struck by Radiohead's "interesting textures and colors and harmonies" but goes on to suggest is that the overall structure, the assemblage of elements, is what truly delivers. (See his illuminating interview in the 6 June Boston Herald.)

O'Riley's great respect for this music extends to Stephen Byram's appealing design for the package, which seems appropriately Radiohead-esque.

And so I find Christopher O'Riley's Radiohead hommage to be exciting, provocative, evocative, and, not least, astonishingly beautiful. I was tempted to dock O'Riley a star for his fondness for repeated (some may say "cheap") melodramatic effect, but this impulse was neutralized by the my admiration for, and appreciation of, the fresh light the pianist casts on music I love. This CD deserves a wide audience and, I hope, will lure Radiohead's fans into the parallel worlds of "classical music" and "jazz music" - both of which could use the help of new audiences.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars when the power runs down, we'll just hum, July 28, 2003

By	Matt Cameron (Newark, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

It's always been a perverse fantasy of mine to hear Thom Yorke's subversive tunes in unlikely places (in the mall, on an elevator, in the dentist's office, at a wedding reception, on hold with Dell, etc.). An irresistable irony: the mundane against the hyper-aware, the placid against the paranoid, the superego faced with the realities of the id. Christopher O'Riley has had this one, too, apparently, given his recrafting of some of Radiohead's most despondant melodies into lovely, innocuous solo piano ballads.

Any Radiohead fan with any piano skills whatsoever has already worked out rudimentary versions of piano-friendly classics like "Knives Out," "Everything In Its Right Place," or "Karma Police." But O'Riley is a much more talented technical player than most of us, and his fingerwork allows for some subtle, sometimes startling revisions of songs we thought we knew. Where Brad Mehldau demonstrated the potential for improvisation just below the surface of songs like "Exit Music...", O'Riley teases out their classical perfection.

I was particularly impressed with the song choices. He manages a fairly even spread, pulling selections from "Pablo Honey," "The Bends," and "Kid A" (although three from the former does seem excessive, especially with only two from the "Amnesiac" era), but passing over some of the more obvious favorites in favor of less popular choices like "Thinking About You," "Black Star," and "Motion Picture Soundtrack." At the end of the day, this record has more to say than Mehldau's interpretations and holds more interest than the string quartet recording of "Ok Computer" released a few years back.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must for obsessive Radiohead fans, June 12, 2003

By A Customer

I'll be honest, I don't know a single thing about classical music. Nada. But I know Radiohead. And I know that this CD is very good. It's obvious from the first ten seconds of Track 1 that Christopher O'Riley is a virtuoso on the piano....but what makes this CD even more remarkable is how he uses just a single instrument to capture the inctricate layers upon layers of sound that make Radiohead who they are. "Everything In It's Right Place" and "Let Down" are the standout tracks for me....it's amazing, on "Everything" you actually feel like you're hearing Thom Yorke's voice.

A great CD. A nice change of pace for Radiohead fans. It makes you appreciate not just the talent of Mr. O'Riley (which is considerable) but also how the music of Radiohead translates on so many different levels.