Ludovico Einaudi may defy easy categorization, but this composer and pianist is already a megastar in Europe. With the release of his mesmerizing and elegant new album Divenire arriving in the United States on June 10th, 2008, Einaudi is set to finally conquer America. Divenire, which translates in English as “to become,” is a masterly mix that weaves together the best of a classical sensibility, electronic experimentation, a hypnotic ambient groove, and an almost cinematic sweep. Part of Einaudi’s talent is deftly dodging arbitrary labels of genre and tradition. Once a student of the famed modern classical composer Luciano Berio and a fellow at the highly prestigious Tanglewood Music Center, the now 52-year-old Milan resident has written some fifteen film scores, several of which have won prizes as best soundtracks in Italian, German, and French film festivals, including the BAAF award (a precursor to the UK’s famed BAFTA prizes) for his soundtrack for British filmmaker Shane (Dead Man’s Shoes, Twenty Four Seven) Meadow’s new film This Is England, which has already won the Special Jury Prize at the recent Rome International Film Festival and the Best British Independent Film award at the British Independent Film Awards this past September. His score for Fuori Dal Mondo(by Giuseppe Piccioni) received an Academy Award nomination as Best Soundtrack Read More…
Einaudi’s eclectic roster of past recording colleagues includes notable musicians from around the globe, including the Turkish electronica/world music magician Mercan Dede, Robert and Ronald Lippok of Germany’s post-rock trio To Rococo Rot, Malian kora player Ballaké Sissoko, and the Portuguese keyboardist (and Madradeus co-founder) Rodrigo Leao.
Einaudi’s fan base is equally eclectic and widespread. He regularly performs sold-out shows at some of the world’s most prestigious venues, including London’s Royal Albert Hall and the Barbican Centre; shows this spring take him to locales as exotic as Tokyo and Mumbai. With more than 20,000 friends and more than a thousand visits a day, the popularity of his MySpace page dwarfs those of most other classical and ambient artists, totaling more than a quarter million page views.
With Einaudi already an immense audience favorite on Britain’s Classic FM radio, millions more fans across Europe have recently heard a cut from Divenire (the track “Primavera”), which was used in a Sony Blu-Ray advertisement that launched last summer. Divenire has already gone gold in Italy, following the success of Einaudi’s previous six solo albums, six film scores, a greatest hits collection, and an album of compositions and arrangements for harpist Cecilia Chailly. In the US alone, digital and import sales of Divenire alone have quadrupled during the last six months of 2007.
The pianist describes Divenire as an album that contains a real journey and larger narrative while it interweaves solo, chamber and orchestral sounds. “You know how in 17th-century paintings a single work depicts several scenes at once—the night, the sun, a landscape, a battle, whatever? I wanted to evoke that sensibility in Divenire,” says Einaudi.
“The music for Divenire was inspired partly by the paintings of the 19th-century artist Giovanni Segantini, who painted the Alps,” he continues. “Before he died, he was working on a famous mountain triptych, the Alpentriptichon, which contains the whole cycle of life, nature, and death. And so the album Divenire is about those cycles.”
“I was also inspired by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus,” the well-read Einaudi continues. “He said, ‘Everything is in flux’—like you can’t step into the same river twice. Everything is in a constant state of change, of metamorphosis. And that’s the idea I wanted to explore on Divenire.”
The first track on Divenire is “Uno,” a piece for piano and electronic loop, explains Einaudi, “It’s like the enigmatic DNA code of the album,” explains Einaudi. “It’s the source material, but you can’t decode it easily. You’re not sure where it’s going to go.” In the title track that follows, the composer continues, “We hear the first introduction of rhythm. And it’s no longer just the sound of the piano—an orchestra comes in. When I compose music for solo piano, I’m more aware of little details; it’s like drawing in ink. When I’m writing for orchestra, I paint with a far bigger brush. Every sound and gesture is amplified: it’s bigger, but it also carries much more strength and weight.”
“Monday” sees the pianist returning to a solo setting. “This piece has a very precise quality, and a very intimate energy,” Einaudi professes. “I think of it as almost a folk ballad. But in the following track, ‘Andare,’ the loop returns; the movement between the piano and the electronic loop is as if the piano has a shadow following it. But we also have the cello entering in a duet with the piano. ‘Andare’ means ‘to go’ in English, and I was really playing with the whole idea of going, of letting energy flow without knowing for sure where it was headed.”
The next track on the album, called ‘Rose,’ harkens back to the earlier piece on the album called ‘Monday.’ “’Rose’ actually draws upon the same source material as ‘Monday,’ though it’s not an exact replication, “ Einaudi reveals. “But the sound is actually reversed in ‘Rose.’ I wanted it to be as if you were looking in a mirror.”
The next piece, “Primavera” (“Spring”), sees Einaudi looking backward to his classical roots. “The name and style is something of a reference to Vivaldi’s famous piece The Four Seasons,” Einaudi observes, “This selection is with orchestra, with a real explosion of sound coming from them that just overwhelms the piano in a rather Vivaldi-like way. But I really was thinking also about how flowers just explode in the spring,” the composer asserts Another reference to nature comes in the next track, “Oltremare” (“Beyond the Sea”). “This is another intimate solo work, a quite dark one this time, that forms part of the nucleus of the album,” the composer explains. “But here the form is quite complex and unpredictable. Everything is built on connections, like in a game of dominos.”
In “L’Origine Nascosta” (“The Hidden Origin”), Einaudi builds on harmonic possibilities. “On the natural piano, the harmonics series generated by playing decays very fast. So I used the electronic loops to sustain those harmonic series. ‘Fly,’ which comes next, is the brother of ‘Andare.’ Here, there’s a piano loop, but then the sound of the piano is generated into new territory, into the sound of a distorted electric guitar, which appears here for the first time on the album. The shadow finally becomes reality.”
“Ascolta” pulsates on a groove of electronic pulse. “Ascolta literally means ‘to listen,’” the composer explains, “and I think of this track’s obsessive loop as if you’re listening inside yourself, hearing your heartbeat. And as the album comes nearer to a close as we reach ‘Ritornare’ (‘Return’), I was thinking of a Shakespearean tragedy like Hamlet, in when near the end Hamlet makes a speech that’s a statement, a bit of rhetoric; that’s how I think of Ritornare. And the very end is the track ‘Svanire’ (‘Vanishing’). There is no piano, just the cello and orchestra, as if I’m just listening myself to this unpredictable melody. It’s like looking at a sunset over the mountains; the horizon line is indistinct. ‘Svanire’ is a farewell, with a sense that this day, this journey, is finished.”