Aquarium

The Anacrouse collection offers pianists, beginners and advanced alike, a wide choice of classical works from the Renaissance to the present day. It brings together major works of the repertoire as well as rarer pieces, and also offers transcriptions for piano solo or four hands, selected for their musical and educational interest. Each score, available individually, benefits from careful editorial work: a rigorously established musical text, clear and legible engraving, accompanied by a short biography of the composer and a note on the work.

“Aquarium” (in A minor), presented here in a solo piano transcription by David Neyrolles, is a dreamlike piece that allows work on fluidity of playing and subtlety of dynamics. This title is taken from the reference songbook “9 Famous Classical Themes for Piano”, the second volume of the Anacrouse collection. This elementary-to-intermediate transcription offers fluid writing that makes it possible to approach the play of resonances and the lightness of touch needed to evoke the transparency of water and the movement of fish.

The seventh movement of The Carnival of the Animals, composed by Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) in 1886, “Aquarium” is a page of striking modernity. With its crystalline sonorities and unreal atmosphere, this work has become an icon of descriptive music, widely used in cinema to illustrate the fantastic or the marvellous. This edition allows the pianist to rediscover at the keyboard all the magic, brilliance and aquatic poetry of this masterpiece of French musical humour.