Christopher O'Riley: True Love Waits: Christopher O'Riley Plays Radiohead

Ever since Leonard Bernstein expressed his unabashed admiration for The Beatles, rock and classical music have stopped treating each other as adversaries, but it's tough to say which side, if either, has benefited from the truce. Sure, there's been Tommy, but also Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Switched-On Bach, The Moody Blues playing with orchestras, oratorios from Paul McCartney, and symphonies from Joe Jackson. It's enough to make listeners wonder whether that old division between high art and low was such a bad idea. But Radiohead reworked as piano music, at least as transcribed and performed by classical pianist and public-radio staple Christopher O'Riley, only sounds like a bad idea. For such a singular band, Radiohead makes the transition surprisingly well. Stripping away the layers and finding the emotional core intact, jazz pianist Brad Mehldau's 2002 album Largo featured a haunting version of "Paranoid Android," and though it approaches the material from a different school, O'Riley's True Love Waits performs the same trick. It helps that O'Riley has the chops to simulate Radiohead's busy arrangements, and on a few tracks–"Airbag" and "You," for instance–it's hard to believe that there's only a single piano at work. But O'Riley's sensitive ear for the material is what makes the album more than a novelty. The pianist has said that he only takes the time to transcribe music he truly envies, and his appreciation for Radiohead is apparent on every track. Where classicized reinterpretations usually sound rote, O'Riley has a sensitivity to the dynamics of the band's songs, flooding his arrangement one moment, then letting the bottom drop out to spotlight the melody line the next. In the process, he showcases the sturdy songwriting beneath Radiohead's experimentation. The instantly recognizable chords of "Everything In Its Right Place" cut through the fog as readily here as on Kid A, and most of the songs sound strangely natural in their new settings. It may be little more than a footnote for both classical piano and Radiohead, but it's one of those footnotes that prove as revealing as the main text.