Fanfare: La Péri

Paul Dukas is best known of course for his “symphonic scherzo” The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which is so vividly featured in the Walt Disney film Fantasia. His ballet score La Péri, which was completed fifteen years later in 1912, is a no less colourful and no less eventful score and would have been no less suitable for cartoon treatment - though not with Mickey Mouse in this case but with one of those wide-eyed long-lashed Disney maidens as the “peri” or fairy who occupies the central role in the story. The Fanfare which introduces the work, while it gives little hint of its exotic setting and anticipates nothing of what is to be heard later, is certainly a spectacular opener. Scored for brass alone, it is one of the most imaginative examples of a kind of music that is not normally valued for its intelligence quotient.