Ludovico Einaudi

The pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi was born in Turin on November 23, 1955. He may owe to his mother, an amateur pianist, his first push toward music and toward what would become an illustrious career. He began his musical studies at the Turin Conservatory and graduated from the Milan Conservatory under Azio Corghi, later refining his craft with Luciano Berio, whose assistant he became, and with Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1982 he won a scholarship to the Tanglewood Music Festival, where he came into contact with the new trends of American minimalism. In the years that followed he composed music for ballet, film and theater, including “Sul filo d’Orfeo” (1984), “Time Out” (1988), “The Wild Man” (1991), “Salgari” (1995), as well as several works for orchestra and ensemble performed at La Scala in Milan, at the Ircam in Paris, and at New York's Lincoln Center.

With the 1992 album “Stanze”, which gathers sixteen compositions for Cecilia Chailly's harp, he begins “a journey toward the essential, in search of maximum intensity with the bare minimum.” But it is with “Le Onde”, his first solo album, inspired by the stories of Virginia Woolf, that he captures international attention in 1996, a reputation further bolstered by the subsequent “Eden Roc” (1999), featuring a string quintet and the duduk of Djavan Gasparyan, and by “I giorni” (2001), a cycle of piano ballads inspired by a trip to Mali. He returns to Africa two years later, at the invitation of the Festival au Desert. From that experience he records “Diario Mali” together with kora master Ballaké Sissoko.

The music he writes in 2002 for the remake of “Doctor Zhivago” triumphs at the New York Film Festival, confirming the growing prestige of his film scores, from “Fuori dal mondo” (2000), “Luce dei miei occhi” (2001), “Sotto falso nome” (2004), “This Is England”, the film (2004) and the TV series (2010), through to “Intouchables” (2011), “Samba” (2014), “The Water Diviner” (2015) and “The Third Murder” (2017). These successes are accompanied by performances at the world's leading theatres. In particular, the concerts at La Scala in Milan, also released on record, at Hangar Bicocca and at the Royal Albert Hall mark the attainment of full artistic maturity.

In the following studio album, “Una mattina” (2004), Einaudi's music becomes more focused and introspective, while the subsequent “Divenire” expands into the sonorities of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Both records, which already top the classical charts, break into the pop charts for the first time. He will be the only classical musician to play at the first iTunes Festival. On the long world tour that follows, he constantly writes new music.

In 2009 come “Cloudland”, with Robert and Ronald Lippok, and “Nightbook”, a nocturnal, inward-looking work that “casts the piano like a shadow, in every direction”. The climactic concert of the European and US tours is once again at the Royal Albert Hall, from which a double album and a DVD are drawn.

For two consecutive summers he conducts the Orchestra della Notte della Taranta, delivering a visionary feat of musical direction that leaves its mark on the traditional music of the “black land of the tarantula”.

In 2013 comes “In A Time Lapse”, a meditation on time. The album is recorded in a monastery and “conceived as a suite, or the chapters of a single novel”, in which strings, percussion and electronics converge around the piano. The world tour that follows is marked by many memorable concerts, above all those at the Sydney Opera House and the Arena di Verona, as well as the special “Piano Africain” concert, for six pianos and as many balafons and marimbas, with which he opens Piano City Milano 2014.

The album “Elements” emerges in 2015 “from the desire to start over from scratch, to try different paths”. Three months of recording in his home studio in the Langhe “while spring was exploding outside” turn the album into “a map of thoughts and feelings, points, lines, shapes and fragments of a single inner flow spanning myth, Euclid, the periodic table, the writings of Kandinsky”. Over the following three years, the “Elements” tours fill theatres and major pop arenas around the world. He performs his “Elegy for the Arctic”, commissioned by Greenpeace, on a floating platform amid the ice of the Arctic Ocean.

From long winter walks in the mountains comes “Seven Days Walking”, an ambitious and visionary project of seven albums released monthly from March to October 2019, as so many variations on a single imaginary path, “entering the twists and turns of the creative process as if into a labyrinth, among forms stripped bare by the cold, in a kind of extreme essentiality”. Alongside the steady release of the albums, Ludovico Einaudi resumes touring the major American and European theatres, including seven consecutive sold-out nights at the Barbican in London.

Also in 2019 he writes the original music for “Mary Said What She Said”, about the life and torments of Mary Stuart, directed by Bob Wilson, starring Isabelle Huppert and produced by the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. Commissioned by the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, he composes the opera “Winter Journey”, with an original libretto by Colm Tóibin and direction by Roberto Andò, a journey through the desolate winter of today's Europe.

The world tours are interrupted by the pandemic, but not the journey of the music. Some compositions from “Seven Days Walking” continue to travel through the most acclaimed films of the movie season, such as Chloé Zhao's “Nomadland” and Florian Zeller's “The Father”, while his music for the big and small screen is gathered into a double album titled “Cinema”, released in June 2021, following two collections recorded during lockdown and released in 2020: “12 Songs From Home”, played on his piano at home, and “Einaudi Undiscovered”, a series of lesser-known pieces, memories, surprises and rediscoveries selected by the composer himself.

In the summer of 2021, Einaudi brings his music back out into the open air in eleven concerts set amid national parks, nature reserves, coves, valleys, lakes and untouched plateaus, reachable only on foot, at dawn, at sunset, under starry skies. An invitation to merge the musical experience with the natural landscape. But it is once again out of the suspended time of lockdown, “with the world outside quiet and silent”, that the new solo piano album is born, released in January 2022 under the title “Underwater”, “a metaphor for fluidity free of outside interference. A fresher, more immediate approach to music, giving in to the flow of emotions, in an intimate, one-on-one conversation with the piano”.

(Source: Ponderosa.it)