Einaudi: Waves The Piano Collection

Ludovico Einaudi's aesthetic of emptiness has won him legions of fans worldwide, and Jeroen van Veen's survey of the piano music which is central to Einaudi's style belongs with his survey of minimalists including Glass and Nyman who are less concerned in music as an expressive language than as a commercial artefact. Likewise, his listeners absorb the music less in the sense of engaging with meaning than as backdrop to activity or release from stress. The works on this compendious collection are nearly all 'songs' of between 3 and 7 minutes, with the influence from pop culture that this brevity implies, and sharing with the pop world an economically aware employment of simplicity and repetition so as not unduly to tax the attention-span of the consumer. As Jeroen van Veen remarks, 'Contrary to ordinary classical music, minimal music demands little of the listener but to escape life's troubles for a moment; no comprehensive musical structures ask their full attention.'