Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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Ludovico Einaudi is without doubt one of the most globally successful piano composers of our time. His latest single amassed a record breaking 2.5 million streams in a single day. His music is ubiquitous in film, television, and media. It is performed at your local school, and in the world’s most hallowed classical venues.
At the same time, Einaudi’s music continues to divide opinion. Some in the piano education community and classical establishment still dismiss his work as dull, derivative, poorly written, and even cast him as a charlatan.
In my article The Appeal of Einaudi’s Music, I explored what it could be that makes his piano recordings so widely and wildly popular, concluding:
“Music can occupy and fill many different spaces in our lives. Fundamentally, it can be truly accessible to us all. Einaudi’s compositions remind us that music does not always need to be intellectually supercharged, even though his pieces are cleverly and carefully crafted. Nor perhaps should we equate the best composition with a dazzling display of technical expertise, or the best performance with physical pyrotechnics. Great music can equally be driven by the flow of emotion, simple connection, and a quest for lingering beauty.”
If this seems a rather hyperbolic preamble for a sheet music review, it is in part because Einaudi’s latest album The Summer Portraits must be evaluated in the context of this larger cultural phenomenon. When he releases new material, it is always something of an event, but does his latest project meaningfully add to the larger narrative of his body of work?
Einaudi’s Musical Journey
Born in Turin in 1955, Ludovico Einaudi was the son of a book publisher, and grandson of the politician Luigi Einaudi, who was President of Italy from 1948-1955, and is regarded as a founding father of the Italian Republic.
Ludovico’s mother was a piano player, and the daughter of professional musician Waldo Aldrovandi. One of Italy’s top conductors and a colleague of Puccini, Aldrovandi refused to work under a fascist government in the 1930’s, so left the country for Australia. He would never see his family again, including Einaudi’s mother (who was just 12 when he left).
In a recent interview, Einaudi opened up about this, sharing,
“I grew up with the image of this person that I never saw. My mother missed her father all her life. Music became a place where she could connect to him.”
Hearing his mother play the piano, and discovering his own interest in music as a child, Einaudi was composing by the time he was a teenager. Understanding that his subsequent life in music is firmly rooted in this family story adds texture to our experience of his work, as it would with any composer.
Einaudi went on to study at the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan, graduating with a diploma in composition in 1982. Following this, he famously took classes with the experimental composer Luciano Berio, of whom he has said:
“Berio did some interesting work with African vocal music and did some arrangements of Beatles songs, and he taught me that there is a sort of dignity inside music. I learnt orchestration from him and a very open way of thinking about music.”
Music theatre, electronic music, and multimedia were among Berio’s passions. But that same decade also witnessed the rising influence of the minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Einaudi’s embrace of minimalist techniques and continuing interest in multimedia were combined in his first movie soundtracks of the early 1990’s, setting in motion the extraordinary career trajectory that has followed.
Absorbing these contemporaneous innovations, Einaudi forged the unique approach that has not only cemented his status as an important classical composer, but as one whose work represents a logical development from those pioneers who immediately preceded him.
Post-Minimalism
The growing impact of Reich and Glass’s minimalism on Einaudi’s musical language can be keenly felt in his early album of solo harp music Stanze (1992), but even more so on his next major project, Le Onde (1996), the solo piano recording which proved to be his international breakthrough
Le Onde began the string of increasingly successful commercial recordings that elevated Einaudi to the status of cultural icon. But some might suggest that here his creative development stalled, and that his subsequent albums simply repurpose the same basic raw materials. It’s a point to which I will return later in this review, but I think the truth is more complex.
Certainly, Einaudi built on his early success with the solo piano albums I Giorni (2001) and Una Mattina (2004). But he soon begun to expand his sound palette. Eden Rock (1999) included a range of other instruments, and is more overtly influenced by the popular music of the time. With Divenire (2006) and Nightbook (2009), Einaudi further added elements of electronica.
Alongside these solo projects, Einaudi has maintained a continuing flow of forward-thinking artistic collaborations that routinely ignore the boundaries of genre. Meanwhile, and often with minimal fanfare, he has also created some of the most poignant film soundtracks of the last three decades.
Einaudi’s recent work includes Seven Days Walking (2019), reviewed here, a series of seven concept albums based on the same core material, released at monthly intervals. The project offers a fascinating glimpse of the intersection between post-minimalism and electronic remixing, and an insight into how to develop simple material into something more meaningful and enduring.
While Seven Days Walking didn’t perhaps create as much buzz as the composer might have hoped, his live performances in the world’s most iconic venues have continued to be met with a near-hysterical enthusiasm, and his lockdown recording Underwater (2022), reviewed here, proved one of his most successful to date, exploring the sound world of the “felt piano” in pieces that are intimate and more concise.
Einaudi’s music is often described as ambient, meditative, introspective, drawing on minimalism and contemporary pop. It is all of these things, but more. It has become the emotional and spiritual soundtrack to the lives of millions. Ludovico Einaudi has entirely changed the landscape of solo piano and instrumental music.
The Summer Portraits
Released in the year of his 70th birthday, Einaudi’s new album was inspired by a summer break at a villa on a secluded Mediterranean island, where he came across a series of paintings that had created over several summers by a previous occupant.
He began to reminisce about his childhood, and tells us,
“I started to think of my summers, the time where my life was deeply connected with all my senses, where the days felt like months and months like years, and I was free from morning to night, and every day was a new discovery of life, with nature being a fundamental part of it. We were one with nature.”
In this short video, the composer tells us more about the inspiration and evolution of The Summer Portraits:
The album includes the following thirteen pieces:
- Rose Bay
- Punta Bianca
- Sequence
- Pathos
- To Be Sun
- Jay
- In Memory of a Dream
- In Limine
- Summer Song
- Oil On Wood
- Episode One
- Maria Callas
- Santiago
Listening to the album, the first thing to strike me is that This is Einaudi. Few artists have been as widely copied and cloned, and yet remarkably his own work still immediately and decisively stands out from the crowd of imitators, his tenderness of touch, subtlety of pacing, and musical voice unmistakable.
But while much of Einaudi’s previous work has an overtly introspective and melancholy character, The Summer Portraits seems to me the happiest, warmest music of his career. The album is uplifting, but never banal.
Most of the pieces are pattern based, true to Einaudi’s minimalist style, but include melodic interest that sets him apart from lesser artists, and reminds us that he belongs to a long tradition of Italian composers whose music combines clarity of texture with melodic purity. His signature licks, steady chord transitions rooted in popular music, and stylised arrangements are all present and correct, too.
In common with top-selling releases In A Time Lapse (2013) and Elements (2015), the composer’s piano is supplemented both by string arrangements and subtle electronic elements. But again, I find the mix of timbres here warmer in tone than on those earlier albums. The reappearance of the “felt piano” effect from Underwater helps, although I equally enjoyed those pieces where he uses a more open acoustic piano sound.
Some will no doubt hold up this album as further proof that the composer has exhausted a shallow pool of musical ideas. I wonder whether the same charge is ever levelled at Vivaldi? But even avowed Einaudi fans may wish that he had used his distinctive voice to say something more radically new.
A more positive way to view this is perhaps that we should best enjoy this album as a happy summation of Einaudi’s art. The Summer Portraits is a work of maturity and confidence and, in my view, one of his most appealing. It is an album that welcomes, warms, uplifts, and leaves a happy glow. Few musicians can claim to have achieved anything comparable.
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The Published Score
The sheet music publication allows piano players to explore solo transcriptions of all thirteen pieces, arranged for late intermediate to early advanced players (around UK Grades 5-7). It appears in Hal Leonard’s usual house style, with a glossy card cover featuring the album artwork, the scores within spaciously presented, and printed on white paper.
I generally approach Einaudi scores with a little apprehension, not least because I personally enjoy his music more consistently as a listener than I do as a player and teacher, for reasons I’ll explain.
A key element of the minimalist style is the evolution of texture and timbre. Some of Einaudi’s best music depends on its fuller instrumentation or electronic elements for maximum effect. I am mindful that the solo piano versions may not satisfy as equally.
A case in point on the new album, the opening piece Rose Bay offers a calming sequence of steady chords in E flat major, the beautiful warmth of the composition enhanced on the album with shimmering strings. In their absence, the sheet music presents the chords alone. I certainly found them calming, even meditative to play, but the overall impact is perhaps diminished.
Maria Callas, a particular favourite, shares the soaring cello solo melody of the original between the two hands, but this again might easily be overlooked by the player unfamiliar with the album. The solo arrangement is certainly effective, but here again we see the importance of approaching this music with a holistic understanding of the composer’s intentions.
I can understand why a player or teacher unfamiliar with the recordings might consider these pieces slight when judging the music only by the transcriptions. It is important to listen to and use the composer’s recording as a launchpad for the imagination. And yes, this of course differs from our approach to piano music written before the electronic age.
Closing Thoughts
My one disappointment with the music book is that I would have liked to see reproductions of the actual Portraits from that secluded Mediterranean island, which inspired such an outpouring of gorgeous music. But perhaps those were always meant to remain in our imagination!
And that of course brings us back to the essence of Einaudi’s work: it speaks to each of us differently, and on our own terms. Those who don’t enjoy his music surely need not be disparaging about it. But those who do enjoy it are in for a treat: I hope that The Summer Portraits will bring many hours of pleasure, enjoyment and happiness.
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