The past few weeks have told us more than we want to know about the relentlessly acclamatory optimism of powerful people for whom detail is a mere inconvenience. Like our new PM, the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi is a populist who has no problem persuading audiences to come out and listen. Tonight’s concert is the first of seven sell-out evenings at the Barbican devoted to his work. And yet his message proves stubbornly empty, unmemorable and humourless – music patched together from cute melodic soundbites and occasional outbursts of bombast.
On paper, it looks audacious. Seven Days Walking is described as a “sprawling and ambitious new project” inspired by winter walks in the mountains near Einaudi’s Italian home. We are promised dramatic fresh perspectives on the same recurring material, which will “reveal new details each time”. This two-hour slab of music, played by Einaudi himself on piano, with Federico Mecozzi (violin) and Redi Hasa (cello) is, confusingly, described as both the “first instalment” and “excepts” in a not terribly helpful programme note – but the material feels so featherweight, and interchangeable between different sections, I’m not sure this matters.
In the Barbican hall, mean-and-moody dry ice wafts around floating bubbles (meant to be snowflakes?) projected on to a backdrop as a pre-recorded harp chimes like church bells in the distance. Einaudi and his musicians walk on stage shrouded in darkness and mystery, and reasonable expectation builds. With an entrance like that, surely they’re about to deliver material of real import and expressive weight? Instead, as Einaudi strikes up his band, the humdrum ordinariness and straightforwardness is stupefying. The effect is that of a standup comedian, who you’re expecting to flip reality on its head with some devastatingly withering and pointed gag, but who can only muster “Buses, eh? You wait 20 minutes and then two turn up at once.”
Einaudi’s music speaks fluent cliche. He might have once been a pupil of the influential Italian modernist composer Luciano Berio, and claim jazz, folk and rock influences, but his musical language is pitifully narrow and getting smaller. Any sense of adventure and exploration, of opening himself up to new perspectives and details, is eschewed. It’s as if Einaudi has started from everything he knows and cannily pureed his musical vocabulary down to an inventory of generic, soulless chord sequences – sad minor tone sighs, affirmative slips into the major, water-treading arpeggios, anthemic fanfares – each designed to push emotional buttons as shamelessly as a Simon Cowell Christmas No 1.
This ruthless stamping on any tension, conflict or internal discussion – anything that might pump some much needed life through the music’s veins – is extended to the sound relayed back into the hall, which is caked in icky reverb and ambient echo. The intention seems to be to recreate the antiseptic environment of a recording studio. Unfortunately, Einaudi is such a limited pianist, with no range of colour, timbre or attack, that this filtering of each note through the sound desk transforms his monochrome technique into something unpalatably synthetic. A woman sitting near me leaves after 20 minutes. Perhaps she’s had enough. Otherwise Einaudi has his audience mesmerised. But I wonder why – there’s nothing to listen to.
• Seven Days Walking is at the Barbican, London, until 6 August.
