Ludovico Einaudi — Composer and Pianist from Turin

Ludovico Einaudi was born in Turin on 23 November 1955. Books and politics ran through the family: his father, Giulio Einaudi, founded the publishing house Giulio Einaudi Editore and worked with writers such as Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, while his grandfather Luigi Einaudi served as President of Italy between 1948 and 1955. Music came from his mother, Renata Aldrovandi, who played the piano to him when he was a child.

He studied at the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan and took his diploma in composition in 1982. That year he also attended an orchestration class taught by the composer Luciano Berio, and won a scholarship to the Tanglewood Music Festival. After the conservatory he spent several years composing in traditional forms, including chamber and orchestral pieces, and from the mid-1980s turned to works for dance and multimedia.

The turn towards the music most people now associate with Einaudi came with Le Onde in 1996, his first album for solo piano. Built on Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves, it found a large audience, particularly in Italy and the UK. Minimalist structures and repeating melodic patterns, with the piano as the main voice, have stayed at the heart of his music ever since.

The records that followed widened the palette. I Giorni (2001) was inspired by his travels in Africa, Una Mattina followed in 2004 on Decca Records. Divenire (2006) set the piano against an orchestra, Nightbook (2009) and In a Time Lapse (2013) brought electronics into the sound, and Elements (2015) combined piano, electronics and orchestra.

In 2019 Einaudi released Seven Days Walking, a seven-part project for piano, violin, viola and cello published over seven months. Since then he has come back to the piano alone with 12 Songs from Home (2020) and Underwater (2022), and to the string orchestra with The Summer Portraits (2025); his most recent album, Solo Piano, followed in 2026.

Film and television have carried Einaudi's music to listeners who might never have bought a classical record. His pieces are heard in the French film The Intouchables, in Shane Meadows' This Is England, and in the television series Doctor Zhivago. Nuvole Bianche alone has been used in the film Insidious and in the British drama This Is England '86.

His music was also used as the score for two films released in 2020, Chloé Zhao's Nomadland and Florian Zeller's The Father, both of which went on to win Academy Awards. His own film work had been recognised in Italy long before that: in 2002 his score for Luce dei miei occhi won an Italian award for best film score.

In 2005 Einaudi was appointed an Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, one of the country's state honours. His score for the 1996 film Acquario won the Grolla d'oro award. His music draws on minimalism and contemporary pop, and it reaches listeners far outside the usual classical audience.

In 2016 Einaudi took part in the Greenpeace campaign to protect the Arctic, and the same year he released Elegy for the Arctic as a single. His singles also appear between albums: Night, Elements and Drop in 2015, Luminous in 2021 and Rose Bay in 2024. His catalogue includes live recordings too, such as La Scala Concert 03.03.03, recorded at the La Scala opera house in Milan.

In January 2027 Einaudi performs in Abu Dhabi at Etihad Arena, the indoor arena on the Yas Bay waterfront of Yas Island. For this concert he is joined by the UAE's national orchestra — a natural setting for a composer who wrote chamber and orchestral pieces early in his career and recorded Divenire and The Summer Portraits with orchestral forces.

The Ludovico Einaudi concerts page lists his dates as they are offered, with the context of the Abu Dhabi evening and practical notes on travelling to Yas Island, and the questions and answers cover delivery, refunds, getting to Yas Island and the weather in January. A short overview of the concert is on the Ludovico Einaudi in Abu Dhabi main page.