Classical pianist returns to the classics on Nantucket
by marli guzzetta  independent arts editor
It may have seemed precarious on paper - classical pianist covers modern rock royalty - but Chris O'Riley poked something of a hole in the wall between classical and popular rock music with his interpretations of Radiohead in 2000 and 2003, earning himself a young crossover audience most classical musicians don't enjoy.

In keeping with his now-trademark rock 'covers,' O'Riley, who has also interpreted the music of indie god Elliott Smith, is soon to move on to the music of belated Nick Drake.

Piano is the solo instrument best suited to interpret the music of rock bands because it is the "most orchestral," according to O'Riley.

"It's also the solo instrument that's most seeking to emulate the human voice," he said. "It has an inherent tension in it. Every time you hit a note on the piano, it starts dying. The idea of making piano sing is a conceit and an illusion we pianists all sort of relish. No other instrument has that. Cello has no capacity for polyphony; and the organ can do it but it sounds cheesy."

Radiohead covers are not the sin qua non of O'Riley's repertoire.

The host of NPR's "From the Top," O'Riley has also received top prizes at the Van Cliburn, Leeds, Busoni and Montreal competitions, as well as an Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Andrew Wolf Memorial Chamber Music Prize.

After a three-year hiatus from all-classical performances, this summer marks a faithful return to all classical for O'Riley, who blows into Nantucket on a summer wind this Tuesday with Schumann's "Carnaval," three Preludes and Fugues of Shostakovich and five of Rachmaninoff's "Etudes-Tableaux."

"They're all composers I really like to play, and the reason for putting them all together is more commemoration than overall dramatic flow."

Before the show, O'Riley shared his thoughts on the pieces he will be playing, describing each as though it were a person he admired.

SCHUMANN

Schumann's "Carnaval" is a lot of people, because it's basically a masked ball, and each of the movements is named after a character from the "Commedia dell Arte," mixed in with various characters of Schumann's own mythology. He split his personality into two sides: Florestan is the person on the heroic and fiery side, who is set against the poetic and inward Eusebius. The two of them are the yin and yang of his artistic personality. In the pieces he wrote, he would assign them E + F. ... He had no trouble dealing with not just making character pieces that celebrated or depicted "Commedia dell Arte" characters, but you have to remember that the people behind the masks were also people that Schumann knew and was trying to personify within the movement. So you have double personalities within each movement, which is a fantasy or hallucination of a social evening coupled with people important to his psychic life.

SHOSTAKOVICH

These pieces are based on Shostakovich's reverence for Bach's own set of preludes and fugues, but they are not merely slavish translations, they are an homage that acknowledges

every part of music from the baroque of Bach's time to the present day. He draws on folk music and liturgical music in some of the preludes and fugues, which are formidable pieces in the style of Bach. Intricate. But I think they're complexity is laid bare as a lexicon of a foreign language. The seam of the fugue is laid out with other voices being drawn out. It's like being given a map at the beginning of a journey. I find it the most important body of music in the 20th century, and I don't think people know about it. ...I think it's the most important because I tend to gravitate toward music that's not just of its time, but an embracing of all the music that came before it. A lot of music has a reactionary feel and others have an academically obtuse feel. But I celebrate the moment in history when the time and place of a composition is not as important as the gravity of the piece. It's a big piece of music. It has a lot of depth to it.

RACHMANINOFF

Nobody made the piano ring better than Bach, as a player and a composer. These are hyper-romantic pieces written in a time when there was already a lot of modern and arcane piano music being written. ... It's as far out and wild as he ever got with piano textures. People know his concertos, but these are a quantum leap ahead of complexity and beauty of the concertos. I CHRIS O'RILEY
When: Tuesday,
  July 25, 8 p.m.
Where: First Congregational
  Church, 62 Centre Street.
Cost: $15 at the door or, in
  advance, at the Antiques Depot
  at 14 Easy Street and the
  Lochtefeld Gallery at 4 Fair St.
For more information
  call 228-1287.