“I wanted to reach out to an audience that wasn’t coming to the concert hall,” Haimovitz said Wednesday over the phone from Tucson, Ariz., where he had been performing the night before. “I wanted to play music that was really important to me that wasn’t being presented in a concert hall.”
January 8, 2014 This weekend, the Chamber Music Society of Detroit presents a pair of noteworthy concerts with a couple of first-rate, and deliciously unconventional, musicians. Christopher O’Riley, in addition […]
Pianist Christopher O’Riley and cellist Matt Haimovitz will be appearing in concerts sponsored by the Chamber Music Society of Detroit this weekend. On Thursday, Jan. 9 at 3 p.m. they’ll be guests of Chris Felcyn on The Well-Tempered Wireless program of WRCJ 90.9 FM. Tune in and find out which Jimmy Stewart co-star has become a big fan of their music.
During the past decade, Christopher O’Riley has been quite busy, hosting From the Top, concertizing, and recording his adaptations of pop songs by Radiohead, Nick Drake, and Elliott Smith. But he hasn’t released an all-classical CD since a Scriabin disc in 2004. That is, until 2013, when his two-CD recording of music by that barnstormer of barnstormers and finger-buster of finger-busters, Franz Liszt, saw the light of day.
2. Christopher O’Riley, “O’Riley’s Liszt” (Oxingale): I love the way pianist O’Riley moves from fascination to fascination with each new recording. This double-disc feels like a concept album: nothing but Liszt transcriptions of works by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner (“Prelude and Liebestod”) and (the pièce de résistance) Berlioz, whose “Symphonie fantastique” is rarely heard in this titanic version for solo piano. It unfolds like an ancient exploration, straight to the scaffold and the “Witches’ Sabbath.”
October 3, 2013 Back in the late 1980s, when Spoleto USA was only about a decade old, I was enjoying one of the programs in the chamber music series that […]
September 25, 2013 There is so much more to a cello than meets the eye. Anyone considering this stringed instrument may stereotype it as low and slow, but cellist Matt Haimovitz proved […]
September 19, 2013 Matt Haimovitz talks about his collaboration with Christopher O’Riley on Shuffle.Play.Listen and the release of Angel Heart, a music storybook. Main Street’s Ashley Thornberg talks about her impromptu […]
September 11, 2013 With an aim of showcasing cultural and artistic performances throughout the school year, the Cheryl Nelson Lossett arts series has Haimovitz and O’Riley booked as the start for a season of four shows. […]
August 30, 2013 PLAINFIELD, Mass. — On a recent sunny afternoon, Matt Haimovitz entered a carpentry workshop here that doubles as a music studio and gently pulled the door shut. […]
June 2, 2013 Christopher O’Riley is one of classical music’s most visible populists,
May 30, 2013 NEW LEBANON, N.Y. — There are two ways of looking at cellist Matt Haimovitz and pianist Christopher O’Riley’s passion for playing O’Riley’s arrangements of pop. On the […]
May 26, 2013 New Lebanon It seemed like such a natural collaboration last year when pianist Christopher O’Riley and cellist Matt Haimovitz collaborated on a recording, “Suffle.Play.Listen,” that one wondered […]
May 25, 2013 Virtuoso pianist Christopher O’Riley has just released “O’Riley’s Liszt,” his latest recording inspired by Franz Liszt, the 19th-century keyboard genius with whom he has been compared both […]
May 23, 2013 NEW LEBANON, N.Y. — If an audience prefers a strictly classical program to their standard mix of classical and pop, it’s fine with cellist Matt Haimovitz and […]
May 17, 2013 Christopher O’Riley (Wendy Lynch photo) Pianist Christopher O’Riley, on a brief nationwide tour to promote his new 2-disc album (and Blu-ray/DVD) of iconic piano transcriptions by Franz […]
Oxingale Records 