The term "classical crossover" has become synonymous with a plague of synthetic monstrosities, but Christopher O'Riley's transcriptions of Radiohead's music, for solo piano, strive for something rather different. It isn't a question of rounding up a batch of pop tunes and applying a superficial quasi-classical veneer. On the contrary, Radiohead's material presents an array of prickly challenges, which O'Riley frequently manages to take the measure of.
Radiohead have fashioned a distinctive aesthetic posture by taking rock music and progressively sabotaging its limitations to encompass any number of sonic effects, asymmetrical rhythms or tonal collisions. Their experiments don't always succeed - they would hardly be experiments if they did - but the band are capable of addressing jazz, rock and classical audiences with equal conviction.
O'Riley's only problem is that he's obsessed with Radiohead's music to a degree that must threaten his objectivity, and his between-tunes introductions revealed both a fan's excitement at meeting Thom Yorke or his buddy Michael Stipe, and a fanatic's enthusiasm for tracking down Radiohead music from rare internet broadcasts or little-known B-sides. But you can't fault his bravery. He throws himself unhesitatingly into the complex machinery of the mini-symphony, Paranoid Android, even if he plays the "rain down" section in the spirit of Chopin rather than following the band's Bach-like lead. He plays Let Down (very rarely performed by Radiohead, as he eagerly reminds us) as a shimmer of notes fluttering like butterflies in a shaft of sunlight, and brings froth and thunder to the bleak plaintiveness of Fake Plastic Trees.
But there were always bound to be problems, and the biggest one is how much, or how little, to leave out. Radiohead have mastered the art of picking tones and colours and framing them in plenty of space, but O'Riley likes to keep both hands galloping frenetically across the keys while pedalling madly, evoking Rachmaninov where Steve Reich might be more appropriate. None the less it's a bold idea, and O'Riley does it well enough to make you dig out those Radiohead albums and think again.
