I'm fascinated by the different ways composers musically refer to animals, either through imitating their physical form or highlighting their abstract gestures. Animals are so inspiring for artists exploring across all artforms because different animal species have their own ways of moving and expressing themselves which human beings will never be able to imitate or understand, but that we are ultimately fascinated by. They also have a wild instinct which human beings seem to have forgotten in civilized society/behaviour. I think we all have a kind of yearning to express ourselves freely and have our own wildness that makes observing animals so inspiring!

I have therefore picked out a few pieces that for me really capture the animal kingdom:

The famous Catalogue of the Birds by Messiaen not only depicts birdsong vividly but also creates a great landscape to go with the birds. Each piece is written for a French province with a title of bird chosen for each region. Messiaen uses the ‘colour of tones’ at its most powerful, where different sounds interconnect and lay the birdsong amongst nature most beautifully. 

Aaron Copland’s The Cat and the Mouse reminds me very much of the US cartoon Tom and Jerry. Copland created the different plots between the cat and the mouse vividly through musical notes. He uses the pace, rhythm, dynamics, dissonance and consonance successfully which create the animation in the music. For example, the music starts with a slow single melody. The sudden loud and dissonant chords show how the mouse is suddenly scared by something. Then the quick and light notes sound as if the mouse quickly runs away. Such techniques and more are fully applied in the entire piece creating a vivid ‘storytelling’ approach to the music.

The Maiden and the Nightingale is the fourth piece in the piano solo suite, Goyescas, composed by the Spanish composer Enrique Granados. Most of the music focuses on the maiden’s mournful song (the maiden sings a mournful song to the nightingale as her lover has gone to fight another guy out of jealousy). After her ‘song’ ends, the last part of the piece is pure bird sound. The creation of the bird sound here is very different here from Messiaen’s Catalogue of the Birds. Granados mainly uses quick and light single notes to paint the melodies of birdsongs. The magic here is that after the sad maiden song, the pure bird sound at the end is like the camera in a film changing focus from the people of the story to the nature surrounding them which echoes the human story, creating beautiful metaphors for an audience to ponder.

Rimsky-Korsakov wrote Flight of the Bumblebee as an orchestral interlude in his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, 1900. The piece is a hugely popular encore piece but it does not mean the music is any less artistic or does not require virtuosic skill. The chromatic scales used in the fast notes create a great sonority for the sound of the bumblebee. The little chords played rhythmically in between the chromatic and super-fast notes create a great tension for the listeners throughout the piece.

The Carnival of the Animals is the most famous work from French composer, Saint-Saëns. This piece might be the biggest cliché when it comes to ‘animal’ music, but the different musical techniques Saint-Saëns uses to depict the different animals and the dynamics of the full suite truly make this set of works the most quintessential, deserving the recognition it has.

It was an absolutely joyous journey transcribing Carnival of the Animals for solo piano, and then recording it for my new album. It was exciting to explore how the piano sound works to recreate from the original ensemble piece and also pushing the idea of ‘interpretation’ for a pianist in this music. It was a combination of how the piano naturally sounds but also how I could vary my playing to give the full timbres needed for the piece to create some truly dynamic transcriptions. In some movements, I feel the piano gives the music another layer in the expression. For example, in Aviary, the contrast of the fast and pedalling sound of the accompaniment with the birdsong in the high registry creates almost an impressionism to the music. In Finale, the challenge of combining all the different instruments within a single piano part makes it a truly virtuoso piece which is really fun.

The way I ‘programmed’ the pieces on the album was also an important part of the journey. I selected music for ‘flying animals’ (le coucou, The Maiden and the Nightingale, Flight of the Bumblebee), ‘fishes’ (The Trout, Poissons d’or), ‘dogs and cats’ (Chopin’s two waltz, Copland’s The Mouse and the Cat) and Carnival of the Animals. It was a pure delight every time I performed the programme live at concert. The programme also had so many interesting stories behind the individual pieces and such a fun theme to talk about. As a pianist, the ‘animal programme’ makes the imaginative nature of musical performance even stronger and allows classical music to be more accessible for audiences (as we all know those animals!). I hope my new album will bring to life these musical animal moments bringing lightness and joy that I want share with people during a particularly difficult time.

An-Ting Chang's recording of her new solo transcription of Carnival of the Animals together with a selection of other animal-themed works is available now. You can listen to the entire album below.