Christopher O'Riley
   HOME
*





Christopher O'Riley
Christopher O'Riley is an American classical pianist and public radio show host. He was the host of the weekly National Public Radio program ''From the Top''. O'Riley is also known for his piano arrangements of songs by alternative. Early life O'Riley was born in 1956 in Chicago, Illinois, United States, and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He began classical piano studies at the age of 4, and became interested in pop music and started his own band in 6th grade. His dual-track musical interests led him to jazz-rock fusion and included a professional performance in his later high school years with the Pittsburgh alto sax player Eric Kloss. His choice of music school was fortuitous as the New England Conservatory of Music had as its president in the 1970s the composer/historian Gunther Schuller. It was upon entering NEC that O'Riley decided to pursue classical studies exclusively. Career In 1981, he won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions. He has received awards at the ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name = United States , subdivision_type1 = State , subdivision_type2 = Counties , subdivision_name1 = Illinois , subdivision_name2 = Cook and DuPage , established_title = Settled , established_date = , established_title2 = Incorporated (city) , established_date2 = , founder = Jean Baptiste Point du Sable , government_type = Mayor–council , governing_body = Chicago City Council , leader_title = Mayor , leader_name = Lori Lightfoot ( D) , leader_title1 = City Clerk , leader_name1 = Anna Valencia ( D) , unit_pref = Imperial , area_footnotes = , area_tot ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Young Concert Artists International Auditions
Young Concert Artists is a New York City-based non-profit organization dedicated to discovering and promoting the careers of talented young classical musicians from all over the world. The competition, founded in 1961, allows artists from all over the world to compete as individuals or in a chamber group, such as a string quartet. The number of winners varies from year to year, as there is no specified limit to the number of participants who can win. Winners of the competition receive a cash prize and are provided the opportunity to perform in concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City and the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. Winners are also provided with an artistic manager who promotes the artist through booking concert engagements both in the United States and abroad, and providing publicity materials, promotion, and career development. Many artists in the program's history have also made their debut recordings through the help of the Young Concert Artists program. Notable pas ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Radiohead
Radiohead are an English rock band formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1985. The band consists of Thom Yorke (vocals, guitar, piano, keyboards); brothers Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar, keyboards, other instruments) and Colin Greenwood (bass); Ed O'Brien (guitar, backing vocals); and Philip Selway (drums, percussion). They have worked with the producer Nigel Godrich and the cover artist Stanley Donwood since 1994. Radiohead's experimental approach is credited with advancing the sound of alternative rock. Radiohead signed to EMI in 1991 and released their debut album, ''Pablo Honey,'' in 1993; their debut single, " Creep", became a worldwide hit. Radiohead's popularity and critical standing rose with the release of '' The Bends'' in 1995. Radiohead's third album, '' OK Computer'' (1997), brought them international fame; noted for its complex production and themes of modern alienation, it is acclaimed as a landmark record and one of the best albums in popular music. Radiohea ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) is a British symphony orchestra based in London, that performs and produces primarily classic works. The RPO was established by Thomas Beecham in 1946. In its early days, the orchestra secured profitable recording contracts and important engagements including the Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the concerts of the Royal Philharmonic Society. After Beecham's death in 1961, the RPO's fortunes declined steeply. The RPO battled for survival until the mid-1960s, when its future was secured after a report by the Arts Council of Great Britain recommended that it should receive public subsidy. A further crisis arose in the same era when it seemed that the orchestra's right to call itself "Royal" could be withdrawn. In 2004, the RPO acquired its first permanent London base, at Cadogan Hall in Chelsea. The RPO also gives concerts at the Royal Festival Hall, the Royal Albert Hall and venues around the UK and other countries. The current music dir ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Rhapsody In Blue
''Rhapsody in Blue'' is a 1924 musical composition written by George Gershwin for solo piano and jazz band, which combines elements of classical music with jazz-influenced effects. Commissioned by bandleader Paul Whiteman, the work premiered in a concert titled "An Experiment in Modern Music" on February 12, 1924, in Aeolian Hall, New York City. Whiteman's band performed the rhapsody with Gershwin playing the piano. Whiteman's arranger Ferde Grofé orchestrated the rhapsody several times including the 1924 original scoring, the 1926 pit orchestra scoring, and the 1942 symphonic scoring. The rhapsody is one of Gershwin's most recognizable creations and a key composition that defined the Jazz Age. Gershwin's piece inaugurated a new era in America's musical history, established Gershwin's reputation as an eminent composer, and eventually became one of the most popular of all concert works. The ''American Heritage'' magazine posits that the famous opening clarinet glissando has ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Alexander Scriabin
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (; russian: Александр Николаевич Скрябин ; – ) was a Russian composer and virtuoso pianist. Before 1903, Scriabin was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and composed in a relatively tonal, late Romantic idiom. Later, and independently of his influential contemporary, Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a much more dissonant musical language that had transcended usual tonality but was not atonal, which accorded with his personal brand of metaphysics. Scriabin found significant appeal in the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk as well as synesthesia, and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his scale, while his colour-coded circle of fifths was also inspired by theosophy. He is often considered the main Russian Symbolist composer and a major representative of the Russian Silver Age. Scriabin was an innovator as well as one of the most controversial composer-pianists of the early 20th century ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernist music. Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: ''The Firebird'' (1910), ''Petrushka'' (1911), and ''The Rite of Spring'' (1913). The last transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His "Russian phase", which continued with works such as '' Renard'', ''L'Histoire du soldat,'' and ''Les noces'', was followed in the 1920s by a period ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

John Coolidge Adams
John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American composer and conductor whose music is rooted in minimalism. Among the most regularly performed composers of contemporary classical music, he is particularly noted for his operas, which are often centered around recent historical events. Apart from opera, his ''oeuvre'' includes orchestral, concertante, vocal, choral, chamber, electroacoustic and piano music. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Adams grew up in a musical family, being regularly exposed to classical music, jazz, musical theatre and rock music. He attended Harvard University, studying with Kirchner, Sessions and Del Tredici among others. Though his earliest work was aligned with modernist music, he began to disagree with its tenets upon reading John Cage's '' Silence: Lectures and Writings''. Teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Adams developed his own minimalist aesthetic, which was first fully realized in '' Phrygian Gates'' (1977) and ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Jean-Philippe Rameau
Jean-Philippe Rameau (; – ) was a French composer and music theory, music theorist. Regarded as one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the 18th century, he replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is also considered the leading French composer of his time for the harpsichord, alongside François Couperin. Little is known about Rameau's early years. It was not until the 1720s that he won fame as a major theorist of music with his ''Treatise on Harmony'' (1722) and also in the following years as a composer of masterpieces for the harpsichord, which circulated throughout Europe. He was almost 50 before he embarked on the operatic career on which his reputation chiefly rests today. His debut, ''Hippolyte et Aricie'' (1733), caused a great stir and was fiercely attacked by the supporters of Lully's style of music for its revolutionary use of harmony. Nevertheless, Rameau's pre-eminence in the field of French opera was soon ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff; in Russian pre-revolutionary script. (28 March 1943) was a Russian composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom notable for its song-like melodicism, expressiveness and rich orchestral colours. The piano is featured prominently in Rachmaninoff's compositional output and he made a point of using his skills as a performer to fully explore the expressive and technical possibilities of the instrument. Born into a musical family, Rachmaninoff took up the piano at the age of four. He studied with Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev at the Moscow Conservatory and graduated in 1892, having already composed several piano and orchestral pieces. In 1897, following the d ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Maurice Ravel
Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer. Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, ''Boléro'' (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel made some orchestral arrangements of other compose ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Fantasia Contrappuntistica
''Fantasia contrappuntistica'' is a solo piano piece composed by Ferruccio Busoni in 1910. Busoni created a number of versions of the work, including several for solo piano and one for two pianos. It has been arranged for organ (by Wilhelm Middelschulte, dedicatee of the work, whom Busoni praised as "''Meister des Kontrapunktes''") and for orchestra (by Frederick Stock) under the composer's supervision. The work is in large part a homage to Johann Sebastian Bach's ''Die Kunst der Fuge''. Conversely, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji's ''Opus clavicembalisticum'' appears to be a homage to ''Fantasia contrappuntistica''. Sections and Piece analysis ''Fantasia contrappuntistica'' is written in twelve parts, and takes about 25 minutes to perform: #Preludio corale #Fuga I #Fuga II #Fuga III (on B-A-C-H) #Intermezzo #Variazione I #Variazione II #Variazione III #Cadenza #Fuga IV #Corale #Stretta The first ten pages of the introductory "Preludio corale" are nearly identical to the Third Ele ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]