Ludovico Einaudi

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Pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi (1955, Turin) was first introduced to music by his mother, an amateur pianist, sowing the seeds for what would become an illustrious career. He went to the conservatoire and, for his talents, received a scholarship to the Tanglewood Music Festival, where his first contact with American minimalism was established. 

In the following years, he composed for ballet, film and theatre as well as numerous pieces for orchestra and ensemble, which were performed at Milan's La Scala, Paris' Ircam and New York's Lincoln Center.  
 
With the album "Stanze" (1992), a collection of 16 compositions for harpist Cecilia Chailly, he embarked on "a journey to the essence, trying to achieve maximum expressive intensity with a minimum of essentials". But it was with "Le Onde" (1996), his first solo album, that he really caught the attention of the piano world. His subsequent releases were "Eden Roc" (1999), on which he teams up with a string quintet and dope master Djavan Gasparyan, and "I giorni" (2001), a cycle of ballads for piano inspired by a trip to Mali.

In 2002, he wrote the soundtrack for the remake of "Doctor Zhivago" and began performing at more and more important venues.  Live concerts at Milan's La Scala, also recorded on disc, as well as special concerts at the Hangar Bicocca and the Royal Albert Hall, marked the coronation of his full artistic expression.  
 
Einaudi's subsequent albums, "Una mattina" and "Divenire" topped the classical charts and also reached the pop charts, a first. During the extensive world tour that followed, he never stopped writing new music. In 2009, he released "Cloudland" and "Nightbook", a nocturnal, introspective work that "projects the piano in all directions, like a shadow". The highlight of his tour was the Royal Albert Hall once again. 
 
For two consecutive summers, he conducted the Orchestra della Notte della Taranta, exercising visionary musical direction that left a mark on the traditional music of the "black land of the tarantola". In 2013, he released "In a time lapse", a reflection on time, recorded in a monastery and "conceived as a suite or as the chapters of one novel", in which his piano was accompanied by strings, percussion and electronic tracks. The world tour that followed featured many notable performances, notably the concerts at the Sydney Opera House and the Verona Arena, as well as the critically acclaimed show "Piano Africain". The album "Elements", released in 2015, emerged "from the desire to start anew, to take different paths". Recorded over a span of three months in his home studio in the Langhe countryside, "while spring exploded", the album became "a map of thoughts and feelings, points, lines, shapes and fragments of an ongoing inner flow through myth, Euclid, the periodic table and Kandinsky's writings". Over the next three years, the "Elements" tour sold out the world's major pop arenas as well as the most renowned classical concert venues.

Ludovico Einaudi has built a huge career as a versatile composer writing for film, dance, musical theatre and many other formats. In 2016, he performed his "Elegy for the Arctic", commissioned by Greenpeace, on a floating platform amid the ice in the Arctic Ocean.  
 
Much of his musical output for the big and smaller screen was collected in a double album entitled "Cinema" released in June 2021, preceded by two collections recorded during the lockdown and released in 2020: "12 songs from home", played on the piano at home, and "Einaudi Undiscovered", a series of lesser-known songs, memories, surprises and rediscoveries selected by the composer. 
 
In summer 2021, Einaudi brought his music back to nature, in a series of 11 concerts immersed in the breathtaking landscape of national parks, nature reserves, creeks, valleys, lakes and pristine mountain meadows, accessible only on foot, at dawn, dusk and under a starry sky. An invitation for the musical experience to merge with the natural landscape. But it was the experience of suspended time during lockdown, "with the world outside silent and still", that led to the new solo piano album in 2022 titled "Underwater", "a metaphor for fluidity without outside interference". "A fresher and more direct approach to music, in the flow of emotions, in an intimate conversation, face to face, with the piano".