Christopher O'Riley is popularly known as host of National Public Radio's "From the Top" series, and of the more recent PBS version from Carnegie Hall. The NPR show, which spotlights young classical musicians nationwide, rolls into town next week for two tapings on Maui and O'ahu.

But O'Riley also is a classically trained, highly pedigreed pianist known for his genre-bending translations of rock 'n' roll music for piano. And so, while in Honolulu, he'll also engage audiences with a solo show, pairing classical Debussy with his own layered, moody reworkings of songs by the late (and cultishly revered) British folk singer Nick Drake. Those tracks, culled from O'Riley's recent album, "Second Grace," follow his series of critically lauded "crossover" recordings, which have adapted the catalogs of avant-rockers Radiohead and a troubled indie-music darling, the late Elliott Smith.

When not redefining the classical songbook, O'Riley makes a home with his fiancee in Ohio, amid deer and rescued stray cats. We caught up with him between gigs at his less idyllic Los Angeles apartment.

Q. Your recent album, "Second Grace," reinterprets Nick Drake's popular music for piano. For that, you used some material Drake never released, correct?

A. Yes, there were lots of scraps of tape, versions of songs he did for himself around the house. ... It's interesting to be able to think about a song as having an evolution, and maybe a different guise, since that's what I'm doing anyway: playing them on piano instead of singing them, and me not being Nick Drake.

Q. You've also released work originally by other nontraditional "classical" artists such as Elliott Smith and Radiohead (O'Riley laughs). Is your choice of artists an eclectic, personal thing, or do you find there's some commonality, say, that there's a darker edge to these musicians?

A. Being of Irish descent, I do tend toward the dark. My favorite novelists ... have a funny and serious sense of humor at the same time — you know, people like James Joyce, David Foster Wallace ... epiphany writers like Cormac McCarthy. Yeah, so some of it is personal taste. But most of it has to do with not really choosing artists per se, but being chosen by the song. There's usually a song I'm listening to nonstop, and it's happened to have been Radiohead for some time. But when I started doing Radiohead arrangements, I was already working on two or three Nick Drake pieces that ended up on the Drake record. It really is the song that dictates what I do next. ... And now, it's wide open for me because now I'm doing songs by all kinds of different bands.

Q. Why classicize rock 'n' roll in the first place? In some senses that reinterpretation strips layers, such as lyrics, and some artists you use are famous for multitracking, that kind of thing. So what's lost, and on the flip side, gained?

A. The bottom line is I'm not trying to classicize music. It's a fact that I'm basically a classical pianist who likes popular music; but that said, that brings up another whole tradition of the piano literature, which is that the piano is capable of emulating, let's say, an orchestra. ... Yes, so exactly, that multi-tracking you're talking about is just a dare, really: How many things can I keep working, and how many will contribute to a unique texture that hopefully will bring across at least the sense of the lyrics, if not the actual text?

Q. You have two albums out that reinterpret songs by Radiohead — a band, not a solo act. I'm curious what specific challenges that presents musically, and what's been the most challenging song or experience?

A. It's really the tactile contact with the song — playing it and hearing it coming out of the instrument — that's presented the most challenges and great rewards. Probably the hardest song, because it involves not just singing but shouting, was (Radiohead's) "Paranoid Android." It was interesting because the shouting also coincided ... with an end section, where Jonny Greenwood plays a cluster-based guitar solo, so I made a decision to use the same sort of harmonic means to suggest no harmony and no melody — i.e., shouting — for both situations, and was happy with the results. Other situations have been very challenging. You're trying to generate noise more than anything else, and trying to do that convincingly on the piano is very difficult.

Q. In your interactions with young musicians, how do "next generation" classical music performers compare with their predecessors?

A. My impression is they work harder ... and also take such great pleasure in it. They have the wherewithal to understand the greatness in all kinds of music, so they're leaving themselves open to having a more conversational attitude toward popular music. That, in turn, informs their classical playing. The joy of music making and the joy of experiencing music as a real, ecstatic emotional response, a visceral one ... That's going to make the next generation of musicians all the more interesting to interact with, and listen to and watch.

Q. There's been much talk about whether classical music can survive in a broader market as generations who've been reared on it die out. Do you think that, and why do younger generations generally show less interest in classical music?

A. I think it's shot itself in the foot. For a long time in classical music, at least in the United States, it's been a matter of trying to make music something that it isn't ... making chatty concerts that irritated the audiences that really came to hear the music, and as you say, were reared on it for generations and generations. And that's why now the experience is — it's insincere, really, I find it, to a large degree — and the best places are those where the contact with the audience is palpable, and the sense of community is palpable. ...

At From the Top, one of the things we're doing is saying, yes, these are the people that are playing the music, and I'll bet you're gonna connect with one or two or three of them, and by virtue of that connection, you're gonna give this music a chance.