Pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi was born in Turin on November 23rd 1955.

Perhaps it was his mother, an amateur pianist, who gave him the first impulse to music, planting the seeds for what would become a fruitful, illustrious career.

He began to study music at the Conservatory of Turin and graduated with a diploma in composition under Azio Corghi at the Conservatory of Milan. Immediately he began post-graduate studies with Luciano Berio, with whom he worked as assistant, and later with Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1982 his talents would win him a scholarship to the Tanglewood Music Festival, where he first came into contact with the American minimalism.

He spent the next several years composing for the ballet, the cinema and the theater, including “Sul filo d’Orfeo” (1984), “Time out” (1988), “The Wild Man” (1991), and “Salgari” (1995), as well as many pieces for orchestra and ensemble, which were performed at La Scala of Milan, the Paris Ircam and the Lincoln Center in New York.

With the album “Stanze” (1992), a collection of sixteen compositions for harpist Cecilia Chailly, he set off on “a journey towards essentiality, trying to achieve the maximum expressive intensity using the minimum indispensable”. But it was with “Le Onde” (1996), his first solo album, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel, that he captured piano world’s attention, further enhanced by the following “Eden Roc” (1999), in which he played with a string quintet and duduk master Djavan Gasparyan, and “I giorni” (2001), a cycle of ballads for piano inspired by a trip into Mali. He returned to Africa two years later at the Festival au Desert. The new album “Diario Mali” with kora master Ballaké Sissoko blossomed from this experience.

The score he wrote in 2002 for the remake of “Doctor Zhivago” triumphed at the New York Film Festival. The increasing prestige of his soundtracks would be confirmed by “Not of This World” (2000), “Light of My Eyes” (2001), “Strange Crime” (2004), “This is England”, film (2004) and TV series (2010), “The Untouchables” (2011), “Samba” (2014), “The Water Diviner” (2015) and “The Third Murder” (2017).

(Source: ludovicoeinaudi.com) Edit Biography