Day 17: Dukas, Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Dukas was a French romantic composer who struggled to make a
living being a composer; for some reason his music took a long while to become
popular, so I think he was a music critic. I don’t think there’s a lot of his music
around as he was regularly unsatisfied with it and destroyed a lot of it.
Luckily for us though, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was rather
successful at its first performance in 1897, and is really his most popular
work! It’s another tone poem, this time based on a work of the same name by
Goethe. The music tells the story of the apprentice who is left alone while the
magician goes off somewhere, and thinking he can do more magic than he really
can, he tries out some spells and gets completely overwhelmed by things.
Thankfully, the magician comes back and make everything right again! As you can
imagine, the music is light and bouncy, tuneful and full of vigour; it seems to
move along at a terrific pace, and at only about 10 minutes it’s all over far
too quickly for my liking!
As you might have guessed, this is yet another of my
favourite pieces, not because I studied it for any exams, but I did have the
good fortune to play it with the South Gwent Youth Orchestra many years ago,
and was totally enthralled by the bassoon part. I believe this music was used
to accompany Disney’s film, Fantasia, but as I’ve never seen it, I am only
reporting what I’ve heard!
The version I listened to was performed by the
Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, conducted by Charles Dutoit.
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