Versatility may as well be Christopher O’Riley’s
middle name. The popular pianist’s three-pronged career is spent as a concert
soloist performing the revered classics; interpreting the music of contemporary
rock bands in original arrangements; and promoting the burgeoning careers of
young classical musicians on his nationally syndicated radio show, “From the
Top.”
On Thursday, October 15, and Saturday, October 17, O’Riley will join the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and
Conductor Laureate Christopher Seaman for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in
Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre in a performance that also includes Brahms’s
Symphony No. 4 and “Iberia” by Claude Debussy. In a recent phone interview, O’Riley shared his thoughts on interpreting Mozart,
learning from young musicians, and the evolution of his musical curiosity. An
edited transcript of that conversation follows.
City: You’ve interpreted everything from classical
repertoire to seminal folk, rock, and indie songs. What would you say is the
origin of your musical curiosity? Can you pin it to a particular moment in your
a life or a specific piece of music?
Christopher O’Riley: I think
it was basically growing up, playing classical music, and getting interested in
girls early on, and realizing they weren’t going to be that impressed with
Beethoven or Liszt. So I started getting into [the] art rock of the time. It
had no immediate effect on my social life, but it got me interested in the
keyboard bands of the time, like The Doors, Iron Butterfly, and then later on I
moved into sort of fusion stuff and started playing jazz professionally in high
school. When I was choosing a music school, I ended up at New England
Conservatory because they had a good jazz department and I wanted to pursue
both [jazz and classical] … I kind of kept with classical for a long time and
let my pursuit of popular music lapse for a while.
And then, actually, my radio program, “From the Top,” was
originally designed as a forum for all kinds of musicians, but when we were
shopping the program around, the stations — predominantly classic stations — were
saying, “OK, well, you play one minute of jazz and you’re off.” I play a
halfway point — sort of a “halftime” piece on every show — and so I thought it
would be a nice way of sort of tweaking the sensibilities of a predominantly
classical audience and share with them small bits of music that I was
passionate about. And the audience would, knowing me as a classical pianist,
presume that whatever I was playing was classical.
So when our announcer would come on and say, “That was our host
Christopher O’Riley playing ‘Karma Police’ by
Radiohead,” we would get emails from listeners saying, “Who is this Mr. Head,
and where can I find more of his beautiful music?” So that was kind of how it
became sort of a habit and more of my activity was involved with basically
arrangements of anything that I was really passionate about. So I haven’t
really been listening too assiduously or keeping up with a lot of music, but
every once in a while, an artist would catch my attention — Radiohead, Elliott
Smith, Nick Drake.
One of my most recent collections of arrangements was by all
kinds of bands: Cocteau Twins, The Smiths, Nirvana, Pink Floyd. And most
recently, a song popped up on my iPod by Sun Kil
Moon, formerly of Red House Painters — Mark Kozelek —
so he’s another artist that, you know, has been out there for a while. I just
kind of discovered for myself, so I’m going to be doing a lot of his music. So
it’s just kind of whatever strikes my fancy, and it’s basically, you know, kind
of the same way that I feel about all of the classical music I play. I play
whatever I can’t not play. So that’s kind of how it happens.
It sounds like what you choose to perform is very much a
reflection of your personal journey as a listener, as much as anything else.
Absolutely.
Many of your piano arrangements of popular music — particularly
Radiohead — are characteristically dense, awash in harmonic and rhythmic
ambiguity. Does performing a piece of such comparative clarity like Mozart’s
Piano Concerto No. 22 allow you to cleanse your musical palette or reset yourself
as a performer?
Well, it’s interesting because this particular Mozart
concerto leaves a lot of room for not just interpretation, but actually
compositional contribution. First of all, you usually have your solo cadenzas
in the various movements, first and last, in this particular one. And Mozart
did not provide cadenzas for this concerto, so I do sort of a standard one in
the first movement but I wrote my own cadenza for the third movement. But then
along the way in all the movements, there are passages for the solo piano that
are notated rather skeletally, and the implication is that he didn’t get around
to finishing them off or he never decided what was the ideal and he would make
up something in each of those passages in live performance. So yeah, there’s
quite a lot of filling in that I’ve been able to do with this. It is a sense of
clarity, but I still do get to contribute a lot of my own material to this
piece.
I don’t necessarily think of Mozart as a composer whose
music allows for that kind of creativity in the performer, so I feel like it’s
nice to present the listener with music that re-contextualizes the composer a
little bit. What attracts you most to Mozart’s music?
There’s a lot of cross-fertilization. There’s a lot of opera
in his piano music, and there’s a lot of piano music or chamber music in his
opera. And so how that translates into my personal approach to a piece like
this is that I’m really trying to think lyrically at all times, so that my
articulation, my choice of articulation is not cut and dried. It’s somewhat
informed by lyrical impulse. So if I imagine the notes are infused with lyric
meaning, then that informs my articulation and my phrasing in a way that makes
a run of 16th-notes a little less pianistic and a little bit more vocal.
There’s a fair amount of freedom, even within the passages
with the orchestra, that I like to bring to this
piece. And especially those passages where the piano is unaccompanied, I think
the composer’s intention is basically, “Well, you don’t need to be synchronous
with the orchestra at this point, so make your own time, really.” I mean I
don’t take it way out, but there’s a certain amount of flexibility that I think
people don’t take advantage of which has made it a lot more fun for me to play
this piece.
I first saw you perform about 10 years ago in a program
that combined Radiohead arrangements with Shostakovich’s “Preludes and Fugues.”
You’ve continued this kind of juxtaposition of classical and colloquial with
projects like “Shuffle.Play.Listen.” Why is this
dialogue between classical and non-classical so important?
I think the question is really more what the need for genre
distinctions are. I think there’s all kind of great music in all kinds of
genres, and I think to make a value judgment based on genre or historical
context of a piece of music is really sort of approaching music from a
blinkered standpoint.
I like to approach things with Duke Ellington’s adage in
mind, that there are only two kinds of music: good music and the other kind.
That puts the question squarely in the hands of the performer. We are
responsible for preparing and presenting what we feel most strongly about. And
for an audience, the responsibility is to be open to that experience, and not
take it in terms of market pressure or what somebody says you should like, but
really view the evidence of your ears and your heart.
Do you find that balancing your professional career as
both a solo artist and a radio host helps to keep both avenues fresh?
Well, I get the most selfish pleasure and benefit from my
interaction with my young musicians, because I make it a point in my
collaborative work to make sure that they are playing exactly as they wish, and
that they don’t have to accommodate me in terms of being terribly clear or
predictable. And as a solo pianist who is constantly falling back on my own
idiosyncrasies at the instrument, it’s really nice dancing with four different
partners every week because if you’re really open to the experience, then
you’re enjoying their own sort of language of rubato and phrasing. And you can
really gain quite a lot from the experience in terms of having that infuse your
own playing with a certain amount of freshness and just a different point of
view. So yeah, that’s been my main inspiration, and that is what keeps both of
them vibrant and strong and engaging.
Have you ever met a young musician through “From the
Top” whose performance inspired you to rethink your own interpretation of
a particular piece or composer?
Absolutely, I think that’s absolutely fair. And it’s not just
the novelty of a young performer. I mean, these kids are extraordinarily
dedicated, and we’re asking them to play their favorite five minutes of music,
so it’s really always a matter of them bringing really world-class performances
of these pieces to their audience and to me, so I’m always keenly aware of
where the kids are and where they’re going, and I have occasion to engage them
on the road in professional concert experiences. I’m just starting a festival
at Tippet Rise, Montana, where we’ll do a bunch of summer concerts, and a lot
of “From the Top” alums will be showing up there to perform with me.
This article appears in Oct 14-20, 2015.
