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, collaboration, communion. Living by the Duke Ellington adage, “There are only two kinds of music in the world; good music and the other kind” O’Riley spotlights the greatness inherent in all great music, self-evident in his all-embracing genre-fluid range of projects.

It is with Mr. O’Riley’s dedication to empowering the learning abilities, the personalities and imaginations of artists, young and old, that he comes to his latest endeavor. As he shares performances of his home-recorded traversal of J.S. Bach ~ The Well-Tempered Clavier he has produced an online archive of video lectures, 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 all the ways the paucity of Bach’s notation encourages us to engage creatively, imaginatively, engaging the inherent freedoms in all parameters of musical notation; instruction and insight to inspire transcendence and epiphany.

In his solo repertoire, O’Riley has always been expanding and building transformatively, first branching out into early Virginalists, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Giles Farnaby, then Bach’s less celebrated keyboard creator, Jean Phillipe Rameau. O’Riley first ventured into the art of piano transcription most famously with his arrangement of the Flower Duet, “Viens, Mallika!” from Leo Delibes’ Lakme, then two by Bach, the Trio Sonata in C Major, and the Dorian Toccata & Fugue,  Astor Piazzolla’s Verano Porteño. Apollon musagete, O’Riley’s favorite work of Igor Stravinsky, and Liszt’s transcription of Berlioz ~ Symphonie Fantastique are two major works which O’Riley has amended copiously

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, featured repertoire of Stravinsky, Piazzolla, Martinu, Janacek as well as arrangements of Radiohead, Cocteau Twins, Blonde Redhead, John McGlaughlin, and movements from recent Centenary-celebrant, Bernard Herrmann’s score to the Alfred Hitchcock film, Vertigo. A similarly genre-straddling, Russian oriented project, TROIKA posed established masterpieces for cello and piano by Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff with arrangements of each, as well as of more contemporary Russian artists, Victor Tsoi and the protest band, Pussy Riot, and The Beatles’ anthemic Back In The U.S.S.R.

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-strung cello and an original 1828 Broadwood, a maker whose sound found in Beethoven deep sympathy.

O’Riley has collaborated with lifetime idol, Argentine Tango Master, Astor Piazzolla’s pianist, Pablo Ziegler. Their touring partnership, originally of Pablo’s arrangements of Piazzolla Tango, lately celebrating Pablo Ziegler’s own compositions, spans a quarter century and 2016 saw the Steinway release of their collaboration, Nuevo Tango.

O’Riley’s recorded oeuvre is extensive, beginning auspiciously with his debut recording of Ferrucio Busoni’s epic reimagining of Bach’s unfinished ending of his Art of the Fugue, Fantasia Contrapuntistica. Ensuing releases celebrated Contemporary American Composers (Adams, Helps, Brief, Sessions), Maurice Ravel, Beethoven Sonatas. O’Riley’s 1994 Nonesuch release, Stravinsky featured the perennial virtuoso favorite, Trois movements de Petrouchka as well as O’Riley’s extensively reimagined piano versions of movements of L’histoire du soldat and his favorite of all Stravinsky’s works, the ballet Apollon musagete.

O’Riley’s recorded immersions into the work of Scriabin: Vers la flamme (Image Recordings, 2004) and Franz Liszt, O’Riley’s Liszt (Oxingale, 2013) were each borne of grand, cross-media collaborations. Vers la flamme was choreographer, Martha Clarke’s synthesis of short stories of Anton Chekhov and the piano music of Alexander Scriabin. The ambiguous harmonic equilibrium and interaction between the synesthetically-conceived piano music created a portal of possibilities pairing particular works with specific dramatic scenario. This Lincoln Center production toured to the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC, to the Kennedy Center, Jacob’s Pillow, and through Lincoln Center’s sponsorship, on Broadway at the Victory Theater.

O’Riley’s most recent New York collaboration was with puppeteer, Basil Twist. 120 performances took place Summer 2018 and was widely praised, including by Ben Brantley of the NY Times.