Présentation du CD « Nightbook » Compositeur et pianiste turinois, Ludovico Einaudi s’est imposé en Italie comme l’un des solistes les plus remarqués, tant pour ses musiques de films et ses collaborations avec des réalisateurs comme Nanni Moretti, que pour ses prestigieux concerts en Europe. Il a fait ses études au Conservatoire de Milan, et s’est perfectionné dans des cours particuliers avec Luciano Berio, le célèbre compositeur de musique contemporaine. Sa musique commence à se singulariser vers la fin des années 80, lorsqu’il s’imprègne de diverses influences pop. L’album « Le Onde », première véritable œuvre en tant que soliste, marque un tournant dans sa carrière: un cycle de ballades pour piano inspiré par le roman de Virginia Woolf « The Waves ». Fin 2001, il sort « I Giorni », douze pièces pour piano solo inspirées par ses voyages en Afrique. Il retourne alors au Mali en 2003 où il rencontre Ballaké Sissoko, maître de la kora, avec lequel il enregistre « Diario Mali », un album dépouillé qui figure au générique de « Bamako », film d’Abderrahmane Sissako. L’album « Divenire » sort en septembre 2007. Il a récemment composé la bande originale du film « This is England ». La musique d’Einaudi est ambiante, méditative, souvent introspective, évoquant le minimalisme d’un Philip Glass ou d’un Steve Reich. Sous ses apparences dépouillées, la musique de Ludovico Einaudi possède une vitalité incroyable. Souvent mélancolique, toujours mélodique, elle s’inspire autant de l’héritage classique que de compositeurs du XXe siècle, sans différence de genre, de Bob Dylan à Luciano Berio. En dépit de la rigueur apparente des compositions, on y retrouve toujours une part de spontanéité et de langueur qui n’est pas sans évoquer les recherches de Brian Eno et de Harold Budd. Au fil des années, des albums et des tournées, Einaudi a bâti une œuvre exigeante à partir de ses attaches lombardes et piémontaises, sublimée par ses talents de pianiste. Il va effectuer une grande tournée à l’occasion de la sortie en septembre 2009 de son nouvel album « Nightbook », rêverie nocturne et méditation musicale sur l’obscurité et la lumière. NIGHTBOOK New album release September 2009 “A night-time landscape. A garden faintly visible under the dull glow of the night sky. A few stars dotting the darkness above, shadows of the trees all around. Light shining from a window behind me. What I can see is familiar, but it seems alien at the same time. It’s like a dream—anything may happen.” This is how Ludovico Einaudi describes his latest work Nightbook, as something transitional between light and darkness, between the known and the unknown. This new album comes three years after the international success of the previous work, Divenire [To Become]. The night is a door that allows us to steal into the universe of desire, of dreams and mystery. “Nightbook is a journey, and each track is like a chapter in a story or the facets of a prism, a way of delving into the more oneiric, deeper side to ourselves,” says Einaudi. “The music opens up gateways to hidden worlds, enabling the listener to enter into contact with their deepest emotions.” The album was gradually composed while Einaudi was on tour around the world, during which he kept jotting down his thoughts and ideas in a notebook, recording them in “musical sketches” that evolved into the groundwork of the present project. “Certain events in particular provided inspiration for the atmospheres in Nightbook,” observes Einaudi. “In 2006 I was playing in the Bicocca Hangar in Milan surrounded by Anselm Keifer’s haunting Seven Heavenly Palaces. It felt like the piano was marooned in this immense space overshadowed by the towers, and this prompted me to delve into different types of musical forms and more mysterious tone ranges. After that came the concert at Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli for the Festival del Mito [Festival of Myth] with the electronic musician Robert Lippok, and then at the Cargo venue in London with the video-artist Matteo Ferroni—these were occasions that made me reflect on musical forces that have a particular primordial power of their own.” Those atmospheres to which Ludovico Einaudi refers are mirrored in a wider freedom of expression and a more open structure to the composition, with original colours obtained through the close blending of the piano with the strings and percussions, and from the use of electronics which, in pieces such as Il giardino [The Garden] and The Crane Dance, amplifies the sound of the piano, projecting it like a shadow in all directions. Tracks like Tu sei [You Are], Rêverie, and Indaco [Indigo], with its closing eruption of the strings, are instead pervaded by that circular, hypnotic, and heart-wrenching aura that has become the hallmark of Einaudi’s music. Whereas one might term Divenire an album that evokes movement toward the world outside, indicating the flow of life in toward harmony, light, and vitality, NIGHTBOOK opens a new gate on the world within, and induces contact with deeper aspects of reality that hark back to a mythical or even primal dimension. “A piece like Eros, for example,” says Einaudi, “is almost like a pagan rite that moves in a crescendo toward a state of ecstasy.” Recorded in Milan and at the Planet Roc studios in Berlin, the album involved various other musicians with whom Einaudi has worked over the years, such as the cellist Marco Decimo, the viola-player Antonio Leofreddi, and Robert Lippok. Each CD contains a personal access code for the NIGHTBOOK website—with an archive of notes, alternative versions, and videos of the recording sessions—a key for accessing the world that lies behind the creation of each track.