Album review: Ludovico Einaudi, In a Time Lapse (Decca)

It's not hard to understand why Ludovico Einaudi is one of the world's most successful living classical composers: there's a deeply satisfying emotional logic to his piano-based progressions that makes him as much the inheritor of Chopin and Satie as minimalists such as Glass and Reich.

Here, the soothing, trancelike wave motion of tracks like "Corale" and "Run" also reflects the calm, considered nature of Albinoni's Adagio, while the more complex, layered pieces such as "Life" blend cycling piano and glockenspiel against rhapsodic, flowing string lines. Elsewhere, subtle modernist-pop touches appear here and there, in the subliminal background noises lending depth behind the piano and violin of "Time Lapse", and the pulsing synthesiser of "Newton's Cradle".

Download: Run; Life; Corale