New Normal Streams

The Summer Portraits Album ∙ Classical Crossover ∙ 2025 Ludovico Einaudi It was a series of paintings on the walls of a holiday villa where he was staying on the island of Elba, in Tuscany, that gave Ludovico Einaudi the idea for an album of summer portraits. Painted in oil on wood by the proprietor and regular visitor to the villa during the 1950s, the pictures depicted views from the house, capturing the surrounding natural landscape, with its blue skies, green hills, and shimmering sea in the distance. “They made me think of the summers that I’d spent in my childhood with my family—all the summers that I lived,” Einaudi tells Apple Music. “It reminded me of how the summer was a time when you would have many beautiful experiences, a time of long days, a moment of light.” Not that Einaudi’s sound is characterized by Mediterranean color and lightness. Rather, with its simple repeating chord progressions that share the post-minimalist world of Philip Glass, Max Richter, and Michael Nyma...