The Sleeping Beauty

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 or in a songbook, 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.

“The Sleeping Beauty” (Grande Valse), presented here in a piano four-hands transcription by Jean-François Pailler, is an ideal piece for working on breadth of gesture and melodic elegance. This title is taken from the reference songbook “8 Famous Classical Themes for Piano 4 Hands”, the first volume of the Anacrouse collection, which offers an interactive approach thanks to its 2 included CDs. For each work, three tracks are available: a reference version (Piano 4 hands), a track for practising the Piano 1 part (Piano 2 accompaniment alone) and a track for Piano 2 (Piano 1 accompaniment alone). This system allows the student to perfect rhythmic placement and synchronisation, even when practising alone.

Composed in 1889 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), this ballet is one of the summits of the Russian Romantic repertoire. The famous Act I waltz, adapted here, requires great complicity from the two pianists to convey the symphonic brilliance of the original. The challenge lies in the balance between the Secondo part, which must carry the dance with suppleness and dynamism, and the Primo part, which unfolds the melody with all the lyricism and grace characteristic of Tchaikovsky’s fairy-tale world.