Ludovico Einaudi

‘The Summer Portraits’ is a song cycle in thirteen tracks, in which the personal becomes the universal. In 2023, Einaudi took a villa on the Italian island of Elba with his own family, nestled in a forest of pine trees, and found the house to be decorated with thirty or forty striking oil paintings clearly made by the same hand.

He discovered they had been produced by a woman from Rome who owned the house for some years and painted new scenes every summer. "Everyone has their own version of the summer portraits," he says. "I started to make my own paintings with music. This album is dedicated to all our summers, all our beautiful moments." 

The oil paintings (which gave name to the solo piano meditation ‘Oil on Wood’) are a symbol of Einaudi's own impressionistic approach to music: each stroke so carefully chosen; powerful moods created by something delicate

Ludovico Einaudi

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