Ludovico Einaudi: Biografia

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The music of composer/pianist Ludovico Einaudi has been described as minimalist, classical, ambient, contemporary and deeply touching… the welcome sound of stillness in a hectic world.

Week after week, his hauntingly beautiful and evocative music has kept him among the best-selling and most requested recording artists (in the UK and Italy in particular).

Einaudi has just finished the recording of his latest album, Una Mattina, for Decca.

Speaking of his new work, he says: “If someone asked me about this album, I would say it is a collection of songs linked together by a story. But unlike my other albums, it doesn’t belong to a time in the past. It speaks about me as I am now, my life, the things around me. My piano (which I have nicknamed “Tagore”), my children Jssessica and Leo, the orange kilim carpet that brightens up the living room, the clouds sailing slowly across the sky, the sunlight coming through the window, the music I listen to, the books I read and don’t read, my memories, my friends and the people I love”.

Una Mattina features Einaudi on solo piano and also includes three pieces with piano and cello. There is a general sense of light in the album that you can feel over the entire recording. The sound of the piano is very pure and warm, with a melodic quality that shines through the whole album as a spiritual guide, like a haunting and mesmerizing human voice.

It was recorded with the composer’s new piano, a Steinway B-211, at the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, where, after the setting of the microphones with the sound engineer, Einaudi alone recorded, edited and produced the entire album.

The solo piano pieces are all extremely melodic, some of them have the quintessence of a song (Leo, Dolce droga, Come un fiore, Questa volta), others have strong, energetic, harmonic and dynamic crescendos (Ora, Nuvole nere, Nuvole bianche), and there is also an improvised piece (Ancora), the longest in the album, which is a sort of variation on a theme that comes back with different shapes and very subtle voicings.

In the three pieces with the cello, there is an interesting mix between the two instruments, where the cello subtly harmonizes the pop melody of the piano (Resta con me), or sings (DNA), or where they alternate each other (A fuoco).


einaudi, the man & his musical beginnings…

Einaudi himself is a classically trained musician and a charming and fascinating man. His rich family history includes a Grandfather who was a composer, a family vineyard and even a past President of Italy.
Born in Turin (1955), the pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi trained at the Conservatorio in Milan, then continued his studies under the guidance of Luciano Berio.
“My time with Berio was more workshop than study, since he immediately involved me in the projects he was working on, such as musical transcription tasks. I got first-hand experience, though still a student, and I have very happy memories of that time, and of our relationship.” This is how Einaudi remembers the celebrated composer of the minimalist avant-garde, to whom he paid homage in 1997 with a concerto for trumpet and orchestra.

Einaudi’s music began to assume its own unmistakeable character towards the end of the 1980s, as he absorbed elements derived from popular music. Around this time he first became involved in collaborative ventures in theatre, video and dance. These included compositions for the ballets Sul filo d’Orfeo (1984), The Wild Man (1990) and The Emperor (1991); Time-out (1988), a dance-theatre performance created in conjunction with the writer Andrea De Carlo and staged in Italy, Japan and the United States by the American ISO Dance Theatre company; Salgari (Per terra e per mare) (1995), an opera/ballet commissioned by the Arena di Verona with texts by Emilio Salgari, Rabindranath Tagore, Charles Duke Jr, first performed at the Arena with choreography by Daniel Ezralow and sets by the American Jerome Sirlin; and E.A. Poe (1997), conceived as a sound track for films from the silent era.


einaudi’s career as a soloist…

The album Le onde (1996, BMG), was a turning point in Ludovico Einaudi’s career – his first real work as a soloist. It is true that Stanze (1990) had included 16 of his compositions, but they had been performed by Cecilia Chailly, one of the first musicians to take up the challenge of the electric harp. With Le onde, Einaudi put together a cycle of ballades for piano (performed by the author) inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, in which the waves are a symbol of life itself.

“If it were a story, it would be set at the seaside, by a very long beach. A beach without beginning or end,” writes Einaudi. “It would tell the story of a man who walks along the shore and maybe never meets anyone. Now and again, his eyes light on some piece of flotsam or jetsam, the footprints of a crab, or a solitary gull. The landscape consists only of sand, sky, a few clouds, the sea. All that changes are the waves, always the same but always different, smaller, larger, shorter, longer.”


The recording was released a couple of years later in the United Kingdom, eventually receiving acclaim from general public and critics alike, with a little help from Classic FM.

The long-awaited sequel arrived in 1999. Entitled Eden Roc (BMG). “In a way, it explores in greater depth the themes raised in my earlier works, Stanze and Le onde. It takes a stage further the experiment of defining a kind of suite, creating shorter pieces, akin to instrumental songs, but always linked to an overall project.”

Eden Roc is a recording with obvious ‘inner tensions’, less static and freer than earlier works. Einaudi collaborated with the Armenian Djivan Gasparijan, a past master of the duduk (a kind of small oboe made of apricot wood) “to emphasise the popular (and traditional) roots of areas such as the Caucasus or the Balkans, which are more closely connected than one would think with the Mediterranean”.

The end of 2001 saw the release of I Giorni (BMG) – a dozen pieces for solo piano, composed as deliberate snapshots of the creativity of a musician who has achieved full freedom of expression. They constitute “a kind of musical thinking process and/or a spiritual piece of embroidery”, inspired by his travels in Africa.

“One day, a little while ago, during a trip to Mali, I was travelling by car with a friend, Toumani Diabate, a virtuoso performer on the kora (the typical Malian harp), when suddenly I heard the most enchanting music. An ancient melody from the thirteenth century. When I got home and was making my new recording, I began to improvise with that sweet, melancholy music in mind, and so I fought off my nostalgia for Africa.”

This was the genesis of an album involving a long process of reflection. (“When I compose, I need to improvise,” explains Einaudi, “but also to meditate for a long time on what I am writing. I progress on two apparently antithetical levels: I create a great diversity of styles then, at a later stage, I review it all with a rational ear.”). The result was yet another performance of great emotional intensity, quite unconnected with the concept of a sound track.

“Five years after Le onde, I again decided to create a solo work for piano; after experimenting with various things, I wanted to get back to the solitary dimension. It is a kind of suite of pieces in the form of an instrumental song. Although each piece has a meaning of its own, they are linked by a general idea of musical accountability and by melodic, thematic and harmonic references. You need to listen to the whole album to get the full message.”

Einaudi returned to Mali – to a spot near the oasis of Essakane, about seventy kilometres from Timbuktu – in January 2003, to take part in the third Desert Festival, a kind of Woodstock of world music, and a celebration of the culture of the Tuareg people of the Sahara.


This time, he was invited back to Africa by Ballaké Sissoko (another Malian kora virtuoso), and with his soft, caressing spirals on the piano “cast a small African spell”. An extract from that live performance, Camels, will be included in the forthcoming recording of the Desert Festival (Triban Union). In 2004, Einaudi returned the favour, inviting Sissoko to Italy for a series of live performances on the art of improvisation.

In 2003, all Einaudi’s concerts were a sell-out, in Italy and abroad. Certainly this was true in Great Britain, where Echoes (The Einaudi Collection) – a compilation of hits from his first four solo albums – had come out in the meantime and sold over 80,000 copies. In 2004, the British public gave him standing ovations and the critics greeted his performances with enthusiasm.

2003 was also the year of his double live album La Scala: Concert 03 03 03, a recording of a concert he gave at the Teatro degli Arcimboldi in Milan: an intense encounter between chamber and popular music, seasoned with hints of his many successful sound tracks.


einaudi performing live…

For Einaudi, it is now a time to take stock: “About ten years ago, after many years composing for various instrumental groups, I began to feel a desire to play my own music in live settings. Being restricted to writing in isolation in a studio seemed too abstract and distant a way of working. I felt the need for a more immediate relationship with both music and audience. I needed to check out personally the meaning of what I was doing, find a direct channel of communication with the public, be at the centre of the magic and emotion that can be created only during a live performance. Basically, these were my reasons for beginning to do concerts, rather in the spirit of someone singing his own songs. In the piano, I have found a home that I feel I have built with my own hands, designing the rooms one by one and carefully choosing the materials and furnishings, with freedom to include the essence of all my past experiences and the things I have loved.”

When asked whether there is a crossover musical trend in Italy, Einaudi replies without hesitation: “Rather than trends, I prefer to think in terms of people. Music is lived by human beings, not by movements. It is not enough to speak of instrumental music. Today I feel closer to a group like Coldplay than to Wim Mertens.”

As he often stresses, his music and his curiosity are stimulated by a constant searching – for moods and notes. This is confirmed by his current project, renamed Transient: a live performance in which keyboard and laptop technology underline the projected images of photographer Armin Linke.


einaudi’s soundtracks

Ludovico Einaudi also has an intense and fruitful career composing music for the cinema. He began with two films made by Michele Sordillo: Da qualche parte in città (1994) and Acquario (1996), for which he was awarded the Grolla d’oro for best sound track. He continued in 1998 with Treno di panna, the only film made by Andrea De Carlo. In the same year, he composed the sound track for Giorni dispari by Dominick Tambasco, then making his debut, while some extracts from Le onde (Le onde, Ombre and Canzone popolare) were included in Aprile by Nanni Moretti.

2000 was a breakthrough year. As well as collaborating with Antonello Grimaldi on Un delitto impossibile, he composed the original sound track for Giuseppe Piccioni’s Fuori del mondo, a film nominated for an Oscar, for which, in 2002, Einaudi won the coveted ‘Echo klassik’ award in Germany.

Einaudi’s collaboration with Piccioni was repeated the following year with Luce dei miei occhi, judged as having the best sound track at the 2002 Italian music awards. He also composed the music for Francesca Comencini’s Le parole di mio padre and Maria Iliou’s Alexandria, both of which were released in 2001.
2002 will be remembered for the sound track of Zhivago, a television film based on Boris Pasternak’s famous novel, which was directed by Giacomo Campiotti, produced in the United Kingdom and broadcast all over the world.
It is worth mentioning that La linea scura (a piece from Le onde) is included in the sound track of Fame chimica, a film made independently in Milan in 1993 by Paolo Vari and Antonio Bocola. Einaudi’s most recent sound track, for Roberto Andò’s Sotto falso nome, came out at the beginning of 2004 and won the prize for Best Filmscore at the Avignon Festival in France.