Acclaimed Italian composer and pianist Ludovico Einaudi will perform his extraordinary new work, Seven Days Walking, at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl on 25 January 2020 as part of a national tour. This will be Einaudi’s first-ever outdoor performance in Australia and in the Sidney Myer Music Bowl’s 60th anniversary year.
Seven Days Walking is a collection of seven albums released across seven months in 2019, all inspired by Einaudi’s winter walks through the Alps. The Italian maestro, joined by Redi Hasa on cello and Federico Mecozzi on violin and viola, takes audiences on a stroll with him and focuses on several main themes, which then recur in different forms on the albums – seven variations following the same imaginary itinerary. Or the same itinerary retraced at seven different times.
“I remember that in January 2018 I often went for long walks in the mountains, always following more or less the same trail. It snowed heavily, and my thoughts roamed free inside the storm, where all shapes, stripped bare by the cold, lost their contours and colours. Perhaps that feeling of extreme essence was the origin of this album,” says Einaudi.
He said the idea for the Seven Days Walking project structure came to him as he was listening to the recordings of the first sessions.
“Each version seemed to me to have its own personality, with subtleties so distinct from one another that I was unable to choose which I preferred. I associated everything with walking, with the experience of following the same routes over and over, discovering new details each time,” says Einaudi.
“And so, in the end, I decided to thread them all together in a sort of musical labyrinth, a little like stepping inside the twists and turns of the creative process, to understand how a musical idea can develop in multiple directions, and changing once again at the moment in which it is heard.”
Einaudi, famed for his cinematic music and immersive experiences, returns to Australia following sell-out seasons in the UK and Europe, with a live show and repertoire regarded as “a grandiose hymn to nature and to the creative wandering of the mind which it facilitates” (The Upcoming UK) and “lovely, languorous and mesmeric” (The Telegraph).
An artist never shy to break new ground, in 2013 Ludovico Einaudi became the first classical artist to sell more digital downloads than physical copies in the UK and in 2015 he became the first classical composer to have reached the top 15 in the UK album charts in over 23 years.
One of his many career highlights came in 2016 when partnering with Greenpeace to raise awareness around the Arctic crisis, Einaudi performed on a floating platform in the Arctic Ocean, against the backdrop of the Wahlenbergbreen glacier (in Svalbard, Norway). The video of the performance has been viewed more than 11 million times.
He has regularly performed to audiences in extraordinary outdoor arenas including the 22,000 seat Waldbuhne Berlin, the 14,000 seat Verona Arena and the Roman Caracalla Baths.
Arts Centre Melbourne and Arts Projects Australia presents
Ludovico Einaudi
Seven Days Walking
25 January 2020
Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Arts Centre Melbourne
Bookings at artscentremelbourne.com.au or 1300 182 183
