Christopher O’Riley

Pianist, arranger, collaborative artist, composer, educator, and media personality Christopher O’Riley follows his passions into a fractal array of innovative directions, ever striving for the truest and deepest human connection, through performance and collaboration. 

It is with O’Riley’s dedication to the learning abilities, personalities, and imaginations of artists that he comes to his latest endeavor — a traversal of J.S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. O’Riley has produced an online archive of video lectures entitled “Everything We Need to Know About Playing the Piano We Learn From The Well-Tempered Clavier,” a series illuminating a new perspective on each Prelude and Fugue, expanding on the ways the paucity of Bach’s notation encourages us to engage creatively and imaginatively. 

Communicating and effectively empowering colleagues continues to be a crusade for O’Riley. O’Riley’s chamber music mentor, Benjamin Zander, had the impassioned ability to instill the inspiration not only to play a piece well, but to play it better than it had ever been played. That boundless encouragement innately informed O’Riley’s work on NPR’s “From the Top.” He hosted the program, heard by a weekly audience of 250,000, for 20 years. For two seasons, “From the Top at Carnegie Hall” ran on PBS, and the second season won two Emmy Awards. 

An appearance by O’Riley on the NPR magazine-formatted “Performance Today,” in which he performed works by Rameau, Shostakovich, and his own arrangements of Radiohead and Nick Drake, was immediately linked to over 150 Radiohead-related websites. Soon after, Sony Classical produced the first full album of O’Riley arrangements, the only classical album to receive four stars in Rolling Stone magazine. 

More genre-fluid projects resulted from his work with cellist Matt Haimovitz. Their first project was an homage to the iPod: Shuffle.Play.Listen (Oxingale/Pentatone), a two-disc set, featuring repertoire from Stravinsky, Piazzolla, Martinu, and Janáček, as well as arrangements of Radiohead, Cocteau Twins, Blonde Redhead, John McGlaughlin, and movements from Bernard Herrmann’s score to the Alfred Hitchcock film, Vertigo. O’Riley’s work with Matt Haimovitz crossed disciplines as well as genres. 2015 saw the release of their Beethoven.Period (Pentatone), their traversal of the sonatas and variations recorded on Matt’s gut-string cello and an original 1828 Broadwood. 

O’Riley is an omnivorous and obsessive reader, and his friendships with writers have engendered his most prominent compositional projects. He wrote incidental music for the CD accompanying Kris Saknussemm’s evangelist road novel, Reverend America. He wrote music for the film adaptation of Saknussemm’s play, The Humble Assessment. O’Riley’s grandest compositional project resulted in over two hours of music embedded in the eBook version of Mark Z. Danielewski’s prose/poem, graphic and historic and romantic odyssey, Only Revolutions (Pantheon). He recently contributed music to the podcast series, Foreward.