The Summer Portraits

It was a series of paintings on the walls of a holiday villa where he was staying on the island of Elba, in Tuscany, that gave Ludovico Einaudi the idea for an album of summer portraits. Painted in oil on wood by the proprietor and regular visitor to the villa during the 1950s, the pictures depicted views from the house, capturing the surrounding natural landscape, with its blue skies, green hills and shimmering sea in the distance. “They made me think of the summers that I’d spent in my childhood with my family—all the summers that I lived,” Einaudi tells Apple Music. “It reminded me of how the summer was a time when you would have many beautiful experiences, a time of long days, a moment of light.” Not that Einaudi’s sound is characterised by Mediterranean colour and lightness. Rather, with its simple repeating chord progressions that share the post-minimalist world of Philip Glass, Max Richter and Michael Nyman, the dominant mood of The Summer Portraits is one of melancholic nostalgia as Einaudi recalls sun-drenched days from a bygone era. “The world has changed,” he says. “The water is grey now where it used to be crystal-clear. So there’s a nostalgia for places that are not the way they were, for a world that was maybe more simple, more pure.” For Einaudi, music and memory are closely linked—his titles often recall a specific time or place, or a feeling. The opening track, “Rose Bay”, is based on a sequence of chords that came to him when he was at the Sydney Opera House, waiting in the dressing room before going on stage to perform. “Sydney is also the place where my grandfather, the conductor and composer Wando Aldrovandi, lived for 30 years. My mother introduced me to music, and she was always talking about him, and about the fact that he left her when she was 12 years old.” Aldrovandi emigrated to Australia after refusing to work under a fascist government in Italy. “And so there was a sort of idea of distance and loss for her.” Each track takes us to a specific summer memory. There’s “Punta Bianca”, named after a white rock formation on the southern coast of Sicily, which Einaudi would visit during his summer holidays. Or “Jay”, fleeting memories of a bird that would come to his family house in the countryside outside Turin where he lives and works—“I always wonder if it’s one of the relatives of the bird that used to visit us when my mother lived here.” Elsewhere, “In Memory of a Dream” takes its name from a dream that Einaudi had about his Australian family: “ I woke up, and I completely forgot what it was about. But there was a nice feeling that stayed with me, and I decided to give it a title.” Einaudi prefers to compose at the piano. “Often I’ll keep playing an idea, and record it until I find a version that I like,” he says. On the orchestral tracks, recorded with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Robert Ames at Abbey Road Studios, he’ll start with an idea, then repeat it, building the work up by layering instrumental lines, one on top of the other. On “Pathos”, he started at the point of climax, taking the idea of a big crescendo, then working backwards to find the beginning of the piece. “Sequence” was inspired by listening to Baroque music, specifically Vivaldi and a recording of works by English Baroque composer John Eccles by the violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte, who performs here. (Any passing resemblance to the main theme tune on Nicholas Britell’s hit soundtrack for Succession is coincidental.) Accompanying Einaudi on piano is his regular team of collaborators: Federico Mecozzi (violin/viola), Redi Hasa (cello) and multi-instrumentalist Francesco Arcuri. “I have arrived at my sound over many years,” Einaudi says. “At the beginning, it was something totally out of control, because I didn’t know much about it. And then with a studio, with having the time to explore different microphones and preamplifiers, I was able to understand, to focus on one piano sound that I started to like.” As well as an upright, he has two Steinway grands at his home studio in Turin, one of which has been “prepared” by creating a second layer of felt on the hammers to soften the sound. “When The Beatles, say, made an album, they could change the guitars for different sounds if they wanted to. Pianists are not usually so fortunate. But me, I have three pianos to choose from—I’m lucky.”