Show caption Lifeless … Ludovico Einaudi at the Barbican. Photograph: Awais Classical music Ludovico Einaudi review – as cliched and shameless as a Simon Cowell No 1 Barbican, London

The Italian composer’s musical language is pitifully narrow and he is a limited pianist. The audience appear to be mesmerised – but there’s nothing to listen to Philip Clark Thu 1 Aug 2019 12.45 BST Share on Facebook

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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.”

Any sense of adventure and exploration, of opening himself up to new perspectives and details, is eschewed

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.