There is a certain type of modern classical music which triggers ASMR-like shivers when you listen to it – the kind of thing which you almost feel emotionally manipulated by when it comes on in a film.
The soaring strings of a Hans Zimmer score will do it, and I only have to listen to two bars of fellow German composer Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight for my neck to prickle. Zimmer and Richter are two prongs in a triumvirate of modern composers bringing classical music to the next generation: the third is Ludovico Einaudi, master pianist who has composed scores for films like Nomadland and This is England.
The Italian composer is the most-streamed classical artist of all time and for good reason: his work is accessible, and is just as good an accompaniment to studying as it is to crying. Classical music snobs may turn their nose up at him, but Einaudi sent the crowd into a trance at the London Palladium this week, where he performed two shows on Monday and Tuesday evening.
Einaudi took to the stage accompanied by a 12-piece orchestra. It was all softly-softly with the opening number, Rose Bay, from his upcoming album, before the orchestra all joined in. Around his third song, Fly (from the brilliant French film Les Intouchables) there was a distinct feeling that the audience was falling into a collective zen state.
The piano was positioned such that you could only see the back of Einaudi’s trilby hat and his heeled boot tapping like a metronome, meaning that some of the orchestra’s characters took centre stage. There was a magnetic young violinist who looked like he was having the time of his life, sometimes playing his instrument like a guitar, and a head-banging cellist who you could just tell was Italian from his movements and gesticulations.
Listening to I Giorni live was like a sonic massage for the brain, though some overzealous audience members broke into applause at one of the song’s many rests. At points, Einaudi would stand up from the piano and conduct the orchestra in a semi-godlike manner. He wasn’t holding a baton but would raise his arms for a crescendo, in a way that felt very omnipotent.
The stage was bathed in warm lighting that sometimes went blue or orange, but all was red for Eros, a slightly manic string-heavy number where the percussionist traded his ethereal xylophone for an enormous drum, and the cellist, previously so fluid, looked like he was slitting the throat of his instrument with his bow. All returned to calm for a series of solo piano songs before the orchestra returned to stage.
By the end of this sound bath the entire room was on its feet clapping in time to Experience, Einaudi’s most played song on Spotify. It may sound a bit kumbaya, but there was that goosebumpy feeling coursing around which you only get in a large, rapt crowd.
Einaudi is the pop master of classical music and dishes out chord sequences that are easy on the ear. He is the guy whose music people will play on the piano in King’s Cross – and when you absentmindedly stop to listen, you might suddenly find yourself feeling a little tingly.
