Pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi was born in Turin, Italy, on November 23, 1955. Perhaps it was his mother, an amateur pianist, who introduced him to music, planting the seeds for what would become an illustrious career. He began to study at the Conservatory of Turin and graduated under Azio Corghi at the Conservatory of Milan. He then studied with Luciano Berio, becoming his assistant, and with Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1982 his talents won him a scholarship to the Tanglewood Music Festival, where he first came into contact with American Minimalism. Einaudi 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 numerous pieces for orchestra and ensemble, which were performed at La Scala in Milan, IRCAM in Paris, and Lincoln Center in New York.

With the album Stanze (1992), a collection of 16 compositions for harpist Cecilia Chailly, Einaudi set off on “a journey towards essentiality, trying to achieve the maximum expressive intensity using the minimum indispensable.” But it was with Le Onde (The Waves) (1996), his first solo album, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel, that he truly caught the piano world’s attention. He built on that with his next release, Eden Roc (1999), in which he played with a string quintet and duduk master Djivan Gasparyan, and I Giorni (2001), a cycle of ballads for piano inspired by a trip to Mali. He returned to Africa two years later at the invitation of the Festival au Désert. The album Diario Mali, with kora master Ballaké Sissoko, blossomed from this experience.

The score Einaudi wrote in 2002 for the remake of Doctor Zhivago triumphed at the New York Film Festival, confirming the increasing prestige of his soundtracks. In his next studio album, Una mattina (2004), Einaudi’s music became more concentrated and introspective, while in the following Divenire it expanded, driven by the sonorities of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Both records, which were already topping the classical charts, also crossed over into the pop charts—a first. He was the only classical musician to play at the first iTunes festival.

In 2009 he released Cloudland, with Robert and Ronald Lippok, and Nightbook, an introspective work that “projects the piano in every direction, like a shadow.” For two consecutive summers Einaudi conducted the orchestra of La Notte della Taranta, exercising a visionary musical direction that left a mark on the traditional music of the “black land of the tarantola.” In 2013 he released In a Time Lapse, a reflection on time, recorded in a monastery and “conceived as a suite or as the chapters of a single novel,” in which his piano was accompanied by strings, percussion, and electronic tracks. The world tour that followed featured performances at the Sydney Opera House and Arena di Verona and also the acclaimed “Piano Africain” performance, for six pianos and six balafons and marimbas, which opened the Piano City Milano festival in 2014. The album Elements, released in 2015, became “a map of thoughts and feelings, points, lines, shapes and fragments of an ongoing interior flow through myth, Euclid, the periodic table and Kandinsky’s writings.” In 2016 he performed his Elegy for the Arctic, commissioned by Greenpeace, on a floating platform amid the ice in the Arctic Ocean.

Emerging from long winter walks in the mountains, Seven Days Walking was an ambitious and visionary project of seven records, released monthly from March to September 2019, representing as many variations around the same imaginary route, “following the meandering creative process as in a labyrinth, among the forms denuded by the cold, in a kind of extreme essentiality.” At the same time as the cadenced album releases, Einaudi resumed touring major American and European venues, including seven consecutive sold-out shows at London’s Barbican. Also in 2019, he wrote the original music for Mary Said What She Said, a stage monologue about the life and torments of Mary Stuart written by Darryl Pinckney, directed by Robert Wilson, and starring Isabelle Huppert, produced by the Théâtre de la Ville de Paris. He was also commissioned by the Teatro Massimo in Palermo to compose the opera Winter Journey, with an original libretto by Colm Tóibín and direction by Roberto Andò: a journey through the desolate winter of today’s Europe.

Much of Einaudi’s musical production for the big and small screen is collected in the double album Cinema, which was released in June 2021. In the summer of 2021, Einaudi took his music back to nature, in a series of 11 concerts immersed in the breathtaking scenery of national parks, nature reserves, creeks, valleys, lakes, and pristine mountain meadows, reachable only on foot, at dawn, at dusk, and under starry skies. It was the experience of suspended time during the lockdown, “with the world outside quiet and silent,” that led to the solo piano album, released in 2022 and titled Underwater, “a metaphor for fluidity without external interference.”

The Summer Portraits, released January 31, 2025, via Universal Records, broke classical sales records, reaching the top of the Official UK Classical Album Chart in the first week after its release.