Ludovico Einaudi - Live in Berlin (2CD) (2008)

Ludovico Einaudi is a minimalist Italian composer, often associated with film, who has enlivened his style with electronic effects drawn from the worlds of techno and ambient music. He sometimes goes by his last name alone. The combination has proven commercially potent in Europe, and given the attraction of Steve Reich and the other minimalists among aficionados of electronic music on the pop side, it's surprising more musicians haven't explored the combination. Live in Berlin mostly draws on Einaudi's album Divenire, which is scored for piano and orchestra. Apparently little known even to Einaudi's fans, it shows that this composer's studio-oriented sound can be effectively transferred to a live setting. The music, with its waves of arpeggiated piano chords, evoke the new age sound of the 1980s, but strike an intriguing balance between that softer aesthetic and the sparser structures of early minimalism. The electronics push the balance farther in the latter direction, serving as solid joints and substructure to the music. They lose little in live performance, in superior live recording aided by the surroundings of Berlin's venerable Philharmonie, home to the Berlin Philharmonic (it's on Herbert von Karajan Street). Live recordings of minimalist (and new age) music have historically not gotten much attention; these genres seem to favor the closed, meditative loop between studio and listener. This one, however, is unusually well done.