EINAUDI: Waves - The Piano Collection [CD de audio] Jeroen van Veen and Einaudi

Ludovico Einaudi's void aesthetic has won him legions of fans around the world, and Jeroen van Veens's survey of the piano music that is central to Einaudi's style is from his survey of minimalists, including Glass and Nyman, who are less concerned with music as an expressive language than as a commercial artifact. Likewise, its listeners absorb music less in the sense of engaging with meaning than as a background for activity or stress release. The works in this compendious collection are almost all songs between 3 and 7 minutes, with the influence of pop culture that this brevity implies, and sharing with the pop world a conscious use of the economy of simplicity and repetition so as not to exceed consumer attention. As Jeroen van Veen points out: 'Unlike ordinary classical music, minimal music demands little of the listener but an escape from life's problems for a moment; no complex musical structure demands your full attention.' All of his compositions are more or less based on the music he heard as a child, when his mother played Chopin's Preludes. Einaudi (grandson of politician Luigi Einaudi) loved the soft, almost hypnotic sound of the upright piano. Because of her, he started playing the piano and tried to find his own way. The melody (if there is one) always falls, barely leaving the classic path of harmonies. Their music is ambient, calm, meditative and often introspective, drawing from minimalism and contemporary pop.