Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Ludovico Einaudi

LOL, YES! This was the movie.

i bought (online) two books. one "Una Mattina" and the other was a "best of". lots of interesting pieces. enough to keep me occupied for several years or more. i have several pieces worked up fairly well. i like his music a lot.

gw

I found a PDF of Nuvole Bianche on my cousins laptop. I gave it a shot, and I like playing what I know of it. I think I am going to buy a book of his music.

Nick, if you like Nuvole Bianche you may want to also try Dietro Casa; it uses the same left hand chord progression (except the d-flat is up an octave). the right hand is not difficult but a tiny tiny tiny bit monotonous (not that there's anything wrong with that) but still very nice piece if you add in all the dynamics and other musicality tidbits. i believe a lot of his pieces are very good for left hand argeggio development / practice.

gw

Great plan!

I too at first found Le Onde to be insurmountable and wound up learning I Giorni first. I Giorni is really a great introduction into Einaudi (at least the early stuff).

After screwing around with a couple of his other works, I've found that Le Onde really isn't nearly as intimidating as it first appeared, and it's (in places) similar to I Giorni (left hand - D A B G)

Once you get into it, I'm sure you'll find that with your experience you can tackle most of his works without a problem.

Seeing him live on the 28th of March in Sofia, Bulgaria. Can't wait =]

That's great news! It's nice to know that you have the intention to try Einaudi.
About Le Onde: I found it not so easy at it sounds... I've tried to work this piece several times and I still can't get a "decente" sound.

I saw a commercial last night with Einaudi (Lady Labyrinth) in the background, for the Nissan Leaf:

Ok, so I'm playing I giorni up through measure 87, which is a little more than halfway down on page 3. I'm looking ahead and see that there are no new sections melodically speaking, but as the piece nears the end, earlier themes are repeated an octave above or so. So I'm thinking that there are no more difficult spots waiting for me, is that accurate?

When learning new pieces, I tend to look through the score, find the most difficult sections and work on those first. But with Einaudi, it seems to me that the most difficult aspect is not any individual section, but instead how individual elements are brought out, or maybe to be more specific, how individual notes are made to sing out above other notes. And also the dynamic changes from one theme to the next, as well as within a theme.

Does that make sense? And does it fit with your experience?

If that's about right, then I think I will change my strategy with Einaudi. Sure, it will be helpful to isolate certain measures and work on them, but I feel like I'll benefit more from actually playing through sections in order, in order to get the overall flow and dynamic coloring etc.

Anyway, any coments etc are appreciated!

For sure!
For me, that is what turns each Einaudi piece in a new challenge. You have to do lots of "experiences" to extract the right sound. It's not enough to know what keys your fingers have to play...

I don't have the sheet music in front of me, so I don't know the measure numbers, but for me the hardest part of I Giorni was the last major section, where the right hand is playing all those delicate arpeggios an octave higher and the left hand is playing some impossibly huge chords. (Impossible for me, that is; I had to rearrange a couple of the chords in order to play them.) Even though it's the same theme melodically in the right hand, I found it hard to play it as evenly and softly as Einaudi does without skipping notes here and there. The very last couple of lines, which introduces a new theme, was also somewhat challenging, because the melody is carried not in the top note with the pinky but the next lower note, so it's a bit trickier to voice, or so I found at least.

In short, if your experience is like mine, the hardest part is yet to come.

Monica, thanks so much for posting that! Whew! Glad I posted that question. I will start practicing that section at the beginning of my practice times starting today. When I looked through the score, I didn't play close attention to the left hand there at the end because I sort of glance at it and interpreted it as being basically the same at the earlier sections. Alas!

So what do you do for those monster chords? Do you roll them? Or, for the one that has the pinkie on G, and the thumb on the B two octaves up, do you move that high B down to the lower B? I am pretty sure I can't play a 10th!

Surely, madame, your Mason has a functional middle pedal...

The Mason is fully functional. Its operator, alas, is not.

Not sure how I'd use the sostenuto for those chords, though, as my right hand is busy playing at the same time so I can't borrow my right thumb to help out with the left hand chord.

I'll have to look at the music tonight while I'm at the piano, Shiro, but I think what I did was take the lowest notes in the chord and raise them an octave so they appear in the middle instead. I don't think rolling the chord would sound good in this situation, but you could experiment with it.

 Monica, I tried rolling the chords, and I decided that if that's what I'm going to do, I would have to do all the LH chords from measure 136 to 173 that way, or else it would sound funny. I'm not playing up to speed of course, so it's a little hard to tell right now. Another problem with rolling the chords is that that section is marked pp, and "delicato" [b]and[b] 1C, pretty clear instructions!  Anyway, I don't think I'd be able to get those rolls sufficiently quiet. Maybe, but somehow I think my technique isn't quite to that level of precision with that kind of LH roll... And of course if I decide to do that section rolling, it will take me longer to polish. The argument in favor of keeping the chords as they are by rolling them is, of course, that the sound is really spectacular. 

Monica, I was surprised to hear that you moved the bottom note up! It's interesting the way different people move things around to make them more playable. I moved the top note down, and although I didn't think it sounded that great, I didn't experiment with different inversions to see if any others sounded better, moving the top note just seemed "logical" to me. Oops, this is music, not philosophy! I'll try your inversions tonight and see if I like them better. 

Anyone else reading here who plays I Giorni (and doesn't have massive hands)? How did you deal with this section?

I'm guessing you're referring to the BF#D and GDB chords there?

This is what I did, however I'm hardly an expert. I moved the top note down an octave and added another note, the lowest, up an octave:

(B F# D) = (B D F# B)

(G D B) = (G B D G)

Well, I'm playing the piece through now, it's so satisfying (even if I'm not at a good tempo!) For now, I'm playing those LH chords as Ben suggested -- thanks for sharing how you play it Ben! I wouldn't have thought of that myself, but I think I like it better than just with the top note moved down.

Monica, that voicing at the end is tricky isn't it. And it's so easy to not bring out that second to highest note, in which case it just sounds like the earlier section without that movement..... I wish I still had my acoustic! I'm not ready to play this in public (i.e. the lounge at our union, where there's a piano, and anyone could walk by!) but I really want to play it on an acoustic. Some day, hopefully soon...

I ended up studying music "Indaco" (btw: is very well written and I advise all of the Einaudi fans to play it) but the versions that I knew were always accompanied by orchestra. Then I found this little gem where Ludovico plays "Indaco" and "Divenire" solo live (without the orchestra).
You must hear.

Carlos, thank you for posting that link. Einaudi says he basically improvises parts of his pieces every time he does a concert, and this is a good example... the way he did the intro to Divenire was different than any I've heard on any of his albums and/or live. I think it was very effective and worked better than what's currently in the sheet music, so I may sit down and try to figure out what he's doing by ear there. Watching and hearing him play that was also a humbling reminder of how much I butcher that piece... he played it so delicately and softly, whereas I am way too frenetic with it. I need to replay this a hundred times and work on my expression. I have concluded that it's hard to play fast AND delicately.

I look forward to hearing you play Indaco. That is one of my favorite pieces on the Nightbook album, but when I saw the sheet music for it I decided it would have to wait a while before I tackled it.

OK, Monika, I knew this video was an inspiration for us
I am also delighted to watch it.

Indaco is awesome. I'll try to send it to the next ABF recital. It's already finished, so I think I can make a record until the deadline.
btw: I took only 8-10h to complete Indaco (intense hours, I must say!). It's not so hard as it seems, and it's memorized