Ludovico Einaudi, the biggest streamed classical artist of all time, announces 7-month recording project

Seven Days Walking: seven bodies of music to be released over seven consecutive months

One of the world's most successful musicians, Italian composer and pianist Ludovico Einaudi, today announced his new worldwide contract with Decca Records. After nearly 15 years and six album releases together, Decca renews its relationship with Einaudi not only in the UK but also globally.

Einaudi repeatedly tops classical charts globally — The Daily Telegraph said he is a “pianist with rock god tendencies — with his haunting and evocative music. With over 1 million streams a day the pianist has clocked up a staggering 2 billion streams, making him the biggest streamed classical artist of all time. His last album, Elements, released in 2015, saw him become the first classical composer in over 20 years to reach the Top 15 of the Official UK Album Charts.

President of Decca Records, Rebecca Allen, said,

Ludovico Einaudi is without doubt one of the most innovative and inspiring artists that our label has the privilege to work alongside. His music connects in a way that unites audiences around the world. We feel truly blessed that our partnership continues to grow and we can further support the unique vision of this utterly brilliant artist.

2019 sees the release of Seven Days Walking: seven bodies of music to be released over seven consecutive months. The first, Seven Days Walking: Day One, which interweaves piano and strings in his unmistakable style, is Einaudi's 14^th studio album and will be released on 15 March. Seven Days Walking: Day Two follows a month later. Each ‘day' is then released, digitally, a month apart, leading up to ‘Day Seven' which will be released in the autumn in a box-set of the complete Seven Days.

The first single from ‘Day 1', Cold Wind, is released today.

The inspiration for the project derived from walks that Einaudi took through the mountains in winter. He explains,

 In January last year 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.

The first album focuses on several main themes, which then recur in different forms on the following albums – seven variations following the same imaginary itinerary. Or the same itinerary retraced at seven different times.

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.

Seven Days Walking was recorded last year in Schloss Elmau, Germany and London's Air Studios, and features Federico Mecozzi on violin and viola and Redi Hasa on cello, alongside Ludovico on piano.

SEVEN DAYS WALKING: DAY ONE is released 15 March 2019 on DECCA RECORDS

ABOUT LUDOVICO EINAUDI

Ludovico Einaudi's music has become some of the most recognisable in the world through its use in films and advertisements, making him the world's most ubiquitous contemporary composer. He has provided music for numerous films including Shane Meadows' ‘This Is England' and the TV sequels ‘This Is England ‘86' (for which he earned a BAFTA nomination), ‘This Is England ‘88', and ‘This Is England ‘90'. His music also appears in numerous feature films and trailers, including the Joaquin Phoenix mockumentary ‘I'm Still Here', the French Oscar nominee ‘Untouchables' and the multi-award-winning film ‘Mommy' by Xavier Dolan, as well as regularly being heard on popular weekly television programmes and high profile adverts. Fans include Nicki Minaj, who walks onstage to his music, Iggy Pop, Tom Hiddleston and Ellie Goulding, but to name a few. Championed by BBC Radio 1 DJ Greg James, Einaudi's music has been sampled by Professor Green and remixed by Mogwai and Starkey. In 2016 the pianist performed on a floating platform in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, specially built by Greenpeace, to raise awareness of global warming.

He has released 13 studio albums: Time Out ('88), Stanze ('92), Salgari ('95), Le Onde ('96), Eden Roc ('99), I Giorni ('01), Una Mattina ('04), Diario Mali [with Ballaké Sissoko] ('05), Divenire ('06), Cloudland [recorded as the group Whitetree] ('09), Nightbook ('09) and In A Times Lapse ('13), Elements (‘15) as well as three live albums recorded at La Scala ('03), in Berlin ('08) and at the Royal Albert Hall ('10).

 Einaudi was born in Turin and trained as a classical composer and pianist at the Milan Conservatorio.  He studied under Luciano Berio, one of the most important composers of the twentieth-century avant-garde.  After some early prestigious commissions in the classical world, Einaudi turned his back on what he regarded as an essentially conservative approach to music to embrace his own enthusiasms, which included African, folk and rock music.

Gramilano( Editor )

Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.

His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.