When Notte from Ludovico Einaudi’s album “Stanze” was broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Mixing It last year it elicited the greatest listener response in the programme’s ten-year history. “Stanze” featured Cecilia Chailly playing 16 exquisite solo harp pieces (directly from Einaudi’s original piano scores). “Stanze” means rooms and is made up of cells, some of which are interconnected. In translation “Le onde” means “The wave” and is partly inspired by Virginia Woolf’s book of the same name. Featuring Einaudi on solo piano, it’s a more fluid, impressionistic work than its predecessor.
Einaudi’s music is finely crafted, pared down and strongly melodic. Easy to listen to, in other words. But the composer has pre-empted any accusations of it being ‘New Age’ (with the vapidity that term implies). He maintains that New Age music is merely ornamental, whereas his own music has more of an architectural structure. His analogy is apposite.
Brought up on a diet of Chopin, Bach, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, Einaudi is a quintessential crossover composer, having also worked in the avant-garde and multi-media. Echoes of Glass’s Metamorphosis piano series run through Tracce, for example, but Einaudi is more lyrical. Although his music is very accessible, his preference for the strong musical line over the merely florid makes it satisfyingly substantial. The cover of “Le onde” shows a sepia photo of a beach, reminiscent of Michael Nyman’s The Piano. One feels that if Einaudi were to get that level of cinematic exposure he could be similarly successful.'