Composer and pianist Ludovico Einaudi found popular and critical acclaim in the 1990s with Stanze, a collection of minimalist solo pieces for harp. Tonight's performance is scheduled to feature another kind of harp, the kora of Ballaké Sissoko, but the Malian musician is stuck in a sandstorm en route from Ali Farka Touré's funeral and has missed his flight, so Einaudi is performing alone. After some movie footage showing Einaudi and Sissoko during the making of Piano Mali, their new duo album, Einaudi plays an opening set dedicated to Touré.

The Italian's piano pieces lie somewhere between the delicate miniatures of Howard Skempton and the more robust exercises of Philip Glass, but they're more simple and four-square in their construction; Einaudi, who gets a sensitive, shimmering, tone from the piano, runs several together in a loose, quasi-improvised fashion.

For the second half, Einaudi announces he will play Devenir, a work in progress, "as a gift". For this he makes use of an echo unit controlled from a box beside the piano stool. In the first movement, as the digital effects hover on the edge of feedback, he creates glassy timbres, like a heat haze, that give his simple structures an extra dimension. For other movements he uses the echo to create a bass pulse, or to enhance some triple-time polyrhythms. Yet many of Einaudi's formulations sound uncomfortably like extended intros to soft rock songs by Elton John or Billy Joel. There's an extra degree of "classical" finesse (Einaudi studied and worked with Berio, after all), but despite the subtle and expert pianism, there are moments of irrational dread that someone might burst into Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word.

But it is the unapologetic sense of pop familiarity that may account for this unassuming but confident composer's popular success.