Well researched and very well performed.

These aren’t new recordings; they’ve migrated from Marco Polo to Naxos’s Film Music Classics series and fit snugly in that marque. Honegger was one of the most resourceful and successful of film composers and his scores seldom disappoint; these ones never do.

We start with the first suite of Regain, a film made in 1937 by Marcel Pagnol on a Provençal theme. The striving and hardship of the landscape are strongly evoked and though there’s a rather deceptively ‘English’ march tune in there the inflexions are otherwise Honegger’s own. Brass writing emphasises the rawness of landscape, of terrain, of the daily grind, and the saxophone in the second cut, Hiver, facilitates subtle and evocative tone painting. But it’s not all grim – the whistling insouciance of Gedemus le remouleur proves a minute’s worth of scherzo high spirits along with some imaginative and unabashed instrumentation – rattles prominently.

Crime et Châtiment – Crime and Punishment to give it its English title – provides opportunities for a character study, not least of Raskolnikov the murderer. Honegger abjures the lurid though, preferring a far more subtle schema altogether. The wistful and lyrical answering themes of Raskolnikov and the prostitute Sonia suggest directions that are soon to be thwarted. The longest track is devoted to the murder. Powerful and dramatic it sports a throbbing, pulsing theme, a musical migraine of the most disabling kind. The killing itself is represented by a brief slashing figure – pre Bernard Herrmann – whilst the terse figures of the final cut, the Visite nocturne with bass clarinet and piano, leads to a rather Russian-Semitic tune.

The two symphonic movements from Le Démon de l’Himalaya are fascinatingly orchestrated; no horns but two saxophones and the Ondes Martenots, harp, percussion and wordless chorus. The first movement is a terse sustained ostinato, gust swirling build ups of great tensile intensity finally dissipated through the most unusual orchestration. The second movement is a solemn Passacaglia – and there are hints of Milhaud and Weill. Things get decidedly spooky before the chorus, before the uplift that it brings and the resolution that is afforded. Altogether fascinating evidence of Honegger’s forward thinking imagination and ear for colour.

L’Idée again features the Ondes Martenots and perky piano figures. It’s a lighter, droller score than its companions. There’s some saturnine sounding Weill influence once more though with less canine bite; some of the piano and brass writing sounds similar to the kinds of thing Martin? and Milhaud were writing at around the same time. The big powerful march theme is exciting on its own merits however. It’s an engaging way to end a thoroughly researched, intelligently annotated and very well performed disc.

-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

Arthur Honegger’s seven-part La Danse des Morts, the music of which he composed to words by the French dramatist and poet Paul Claudel who he’d previously collaborated with for the oratorio Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher, forms a sort of huge “ascension”: the first four parts provide the human basis, God replies in Part Five, followed by Faith in the Cross and the Lord’s promise to the children of Israel (Affirmation). Two earlier orchestral works, the Pastorale d’eté (1920) and the Nocturne (1936), complete the disc. Henri Vachey conducts Le jeune orchestre symphonique de Douai.

The Prospero Trio – Jana Vander Schaaf Ross (violin), Nick Ross (piano), Wesley Baldwin (cello) – are heard to play on this Centaur disc four works of chamber music, three duos and a trio, by one the very best of 20th c. French composers, Arthur Honegger (1982-1955), from recordings made in 2009, 2012 & 2013. The duos each feature a different combination of performers: violin and piano, cello and piano, and violin and cello. All three performers maintain private or university teaching positions, placements in ensembles or orchestras and active performance agendas in the Tennessee-Ohio region of the US.

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Click Here for the complete Naxos Film Music Classic Series

Includes work(s) for orch by Arthur Honegger. Ensemble: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: Takuo Yuasa.

REVIEWS:
Opera News (4/00, pp.85-86) - "...All the vocal soloists give theatrically involved, musically sound performances. [Borst] sings with an undulating beauty that makes up for occasional unintelligibility.... Fersen delivers a fearsomely effective rendition of the Prophetess's incantation..."

"This is the fourth production on the Sinfonieorchester Basel's in-house label, established in 2012. Renowned American conductor and pianist Dennis Russell Davies has been the orchestra's principal conductor since 2009. Honegger's Second Symphony (‘Symphonie liturgique’), completed in 1941 and premiered by Paul Sacher in 1942, follows the dramatic and emotional symphonic tradition of Beethoven, but in its form and spirit, hues towards the style of Haydn or Mozart."

As a Swiss composer, Arthur Honegger was probably the bird of paradise among the Paris composers of the "Groupe des Six". The fact that he managed to combine the simplicity and plainness demanded above all by Jean Cocteau with his fascination for Wagner and Debussy indicates a strong personality. It is also reflected in his numerous song compositions and can be experienced wonderfully in the selection that Holger Falk and Steffen Schleiermacher have made for their latest album - including many a surprise. As with the other Five of the "Groupe des Six", Honegger preferred to set contemporary poems to music; Apollinaire and Claudel were particularly popular. But older texts also seem to fascinate him: The wonderfully purring stories by Saluste du Bartas and Pierre de Ronsard transport us into a baroque world in which biting irony and the most serious passion can hardly be distinguished. Honegger - unlike his colleagues - was also fond of the large symphonic form, including some stage successes. Some of this can be found in his songs; the early "Quatre Poèmes" surprise with harmonic opulence, far from any neo-classical attitude. Even at a ripe old age, the composer still counted these pieces among his best. The works presented here by Falk and Schleiermacher with an unerring sense for fine nuances span an entire composer's life. The consistently demanding piano part remains a constant and creates an atmosphere with sometimes almost endless, yet never obtrusive ostinati, on which Holger Falk's supple baritone can unfold most beautifully.

Also available on DVD

Jeanne d’Arc au Bucher, written by the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger in 1938, is a fascinating oratorio. The text by Paul Claudel is constructed like a flashback, in which Joan looks back over her life just before she dies.

Marion Cotillard plays Joan with intensity and sincerity. The last moments of the martyr’s life, illustrated by the evocative and innovative music of Honegger, resound like a heartrending cry. With an exceptional cast of performers, this live recording offers a gripping new version of one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century music.

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REVIEWS:

Cotillard movingly captures Jeanne's wildly contrasting moods while Xavier Gallas is consoling yet determined in supporting her. Most impressive of all, though, are the searing choral contributions that are convincing in their heartfelt gallic fervor, from an oppressed people, via baying crowd to angelic host.

– BBC Music Magazine

Cotillard marvelously captures Jeanne's innocence, toughness and terrifying doubts; Gallais is compassionate, tender, and at times tellingly fierce. The impact is immeasurably heightened on DVD by our being able to see both the sorrowing beauty of Gallais's face and the extraordinary way Cotillard's eyes let us know exactly what is going on in Jeanne's mind and soul.

– Gramophone

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A fine guide with performances as subtle as they are perceptive.

It’s very unusual to find all Honegger’s Violin Sonatas — which includes the solo sonata of 1940 — grouped together in one disc. In fact I’m not aware of another such coupling in the current catalogue, which gives this budget price entrant cachet. Even better, the performances are persuasive and finely played and recorded.
 
This would amount to a recommendation even were the music not so attractive, which is not to say it’s transparent, as there are moments of occlusion and introspection along the way. The First Sonata is actually the unnumbered D minor of 1912. I agree wholly with Anyssa Neumann’s booklet notes that the opening embeds genuine ‘pathos’—it’s the pathos of popular song, in my view, to which Laurence Kayaleh responds with pervasive and elegant portamenti and effusive lyric intensity. There’s a degree of agitato in this work and Brahmsian striving, and it’s understandable that it was not published during Honegger’s lifetime in a sense, given the influences. But it’s still a big, confident utterance from the young composer. The slow movement is engagingly done, with its odd Delian moments, and the March section is well characterised. The confident and puckish finale is interrupted by a moment of baroque reportage, before a nobly conceived maestoso sweeps us to the finish. As she does throughout, Kayaleh plays with a refined tonal palette. She doesn’t make a big sound, but it is finely coloured.
 
The first numbered sonata was written during the last two years of the First World War. It’s a more focused work, less effusive, and sites the fast movement centrally between two essentially slow ones. The central panel of the Presto is played with the mute, and the whole thing is freely ruminative, though I detect Franck still in his musical handwriting. Stark intoning begins the finale, and here Kayaleh powerfully intensifies her vibrato width. It’s hard not to read into this movement something of the same spirit, but not the same means, that informs John Ireland’s contemporaneous Second Violin Sonata.
 
By contrast the 1919 Second Sonata has rather dreamlike qualities. It takes in a fugal moment, whilst remaining strongly chromatic, indeed compact in its reach — it’s 12 minutes in length in this performance. The finale’s ebullience removes the rather heavy atmosphere brilliantly, fully conveyed by Kayaleh and Paul Stewart. The solo sonata is becoming ever more popular and this performance will not harm that status in any way. What I like especially is the generosity of her grazioso phrasing in the Allegretto; delightfully done.
 
So if you lack these sonatas, or are curious about Honegger’s approach to them, this disc will stand as a fine guide with performances as subtle as they are perceptive.
 
-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International  

Honegger by Honegger: historic recordings from 1929 to 1947. In the third leg of our pilgrimage in search of long lost sound, we brought down the from the shelves of the abundant archives of the Discothèque Centrale de Radio France, a series of recordings related to the composer, director and pianist Arthur Honegger. The was engravings of the 'Rugby' or 'Pacific. 2.3.1' symphonic movements are famous (or at least known...) but music and record lovers will notice in this new volume in the collection «Pêcheurs de perles» this rare Decca version of Symphony No.3 «Liturgique? under the direction of the author. Also to be discovered are fifteen rare melodies, presented and sung her by voices chosen by Honegger, all the more interesting since the composer himself sat at the piano. These are tones from the past in moving and ideal live interpretations. A priceless witness of Arthur Honegger's way of thinking about music.

St�phane Den�ve, Chief Conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (SWR) leads his orchestra on this recording in interpretations of the music of French composer Arthur Honegger (1892-1955), works that count among Honegger's best known, including his Second and Third (the 'Liturgique') Symphonies, Rugby and Pacific 231, the latter two works brief bursts of considerable energy and impact. Honegger's mingling at the outer edges of the "Les Six" group of composers and his admiration, in this sense contradictory, of German music, including Wagner, gives his works peculiar piquancy.

Now in his nineties, Herbert Blomstedt, former conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, is still a powerful interpreter of the symphonic repertoire. His program with the Wiener Philharmoniker is straightforward: it begins with Honegger’s brilliant Third Symphony and ends with Brahms’ Fourth. The eminent maestro, one of the orchestra’s favorites since his debut at the 2011 Salzburg Mozart Week, continues to enchant audiences with his enormous presence, verve and artistic drive. “A stirring, long-lasting listening experience. At the end, standing ovations and boundless cheers.” (br-klassik.de) / “Fortunately, they still exist, the magical moments when time stands still, when music reaches and touches people.” (Die Presse)

Gripping, highly emotional interpretations of the symphonies of one of the most famous and important composers of the 20th century.

Arthur Honegger's song output falls into two distinct periods. The first spans his apprentice years from 1914 - the date of the first of the 4 Poemes H.7 - to 1924. He returned to art song on the eve of the Second World War, and Eleni-Lydia Stamellou sings two further sets of songs originally conceived as film accompaniments. In the 4 Poems there is a Debussyan turn to the harmony which mirrors the symbolist flavour of the text. More distinct from the model of Debussy is the album's title track, 'Petite Chapelle', with it's avowedly spiritual character. Honegger conceived his 3 Poemes de Paul Fort in the autumn of 1916. Here the relationship between music and text is more directly illustrative, as in the distant hunting horns to accompany the hunter lost in the forest. From February 1917, Nature morte stands alone as a musical still-life, a brief sketch of a bowl of peaches and white grapes. No less epigrammatic, but more musically adventurous as befitting the text, are Honegger's settings of the 6 Poemes d'Apollinaire which he composed between August 1915 and March 1917. But, for all Apollinaire's influence over the composers of 'Les Six' - Honegger included - Jean Cocteau was far more instrumental in determining their aesthetic aims. And though it was Apollinaire who had coined sur-realisme in response to seeing the premiere of Satie's ballet Parade in 1917, this new, mischievous spirit courses through Honegger's deft settings of Cocteau. Honegger makes a sincere tribute to one of France's most celebrated Renaissance-era poets in the Chanson de Ronsard from February 1924. From 1926, the 3 Chansons de La Petite Sirene feature whole-tone rising harmonies in the opening song, and the even briefer companions uphold a Satie-like inscrutability. At this point, Honegger continued in vocal music (operas, operettas and oratorio) but left song alone. However, in 1937, his soundtrack to Jean Choux 'talkie' remake of Louis Mercanton's 1920 silent film Miarka, la fille � l'ourse afforded an opportunity to write two brief songs. Eleni Lydia Stamellou's recital closes with another pair of songs written for the cinema, the Romances sentimentales for Un seul amour, a story by Balzac very loosely adapted for the screen by Pierre Blanchar. In a genre all their own are the settings of 3 Psaumes, which Honegger composed in occupied Paris over the winter of 1940/1. The sound of the organ underpins the Bachian flow accompanying Psalm 34 and the misty F minor chords beneath Psalm 140, even if the vocal line itself harks back to Honegger's song-writing of the 1920s. Other information: - Recorded April-December 2024 in St Petersburg, Russia - Booklet in English contains liner notes by Peter Quantrill and profiles of the musicians - Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) was a Swiss composer associated with the French musical movement Les Six. Known for his eclectic style, he blended elements of French impressionism, German romanticism, and modernist techniques. While Honegger is best known for his orchestral works, such as Pacific 231 and Jeanne d'Arc au b�cher, his vocal compositions show a more intimate and lyrical side of his artistry. - Honegger's songs reflect his deep sensitivity to poetry and text, setting works by prominent French poets like Paul Fort and Jean Cocteau. His melodies for voice and piano exhibit rich harmonic textures and expressive phrasing, demonstrating both refinement and emotional depth. Unlike his orchestral pieces, which can be complex and rhythmically driven, his songs favor clarity and directness, allowing the poetry to shine through. - Greek soprano Eleni Lydia Stamellou was Prize Winner at the Ferruccio Tagliavini Competition in Austria, with Dame Joan Sutherland as the president of the jury. She subsequently attended masterclasses given by Teresa Berganza, Edda Moser and Christa Ludwig. She sang in opera productions with MusicAeterna conducted by Teodor Currentzis. Her specialization is Renaissance/Baroque and Contemporary Music. She sang in productions of Berio and Hersant.

A household word when speaking of repertoire, legendary flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal devoted just as much effort to establishing the masterpieces in their rightful place as to unearthing countless works from the baroque, classical and romantic eras. As far as concertos are concerned, cornerstones by Bach, Mozart and Vivaldi thus gained worldwide fame, and it went the same way for Ibert, Jolivet and Nielsen. Unfailing lyric sense, purity of style, magnificent tone, grace of phrasing, fabulous virtuosity, tremendous commitment... Critics, colleagues and the public were all running out of superlatives. Immediately valued as references, his recordings still fascinate and often leave the listener exhilarated. This 12 CD set tries the challenge of surrounding these marvels with some of the most dazzling rediscoveries, offering famous and less famous music, but equally glorious interpretations.

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