Arthur Honegger News
Swiss composer (1892-1928)
Commemorations 2025 (Death: Arthur Honegger)
- cello
- opera, symphony, sardana
- Switzerland, France
- classical composer, musicologist, music teacher, film score composer, composer
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2024-03-24
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The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2024-02-17 13:50:36
On a Saturday evening some 70 years ago I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra live for the first time. Melville Smith, then director of the Longy School, had given me two tickets he couldn’t use. Charles Munch conducted. Before the intermission came Honegger’s Symphony no. 1; the program notes mentioned harmony that “trends toward C major,” which amused me and my 9th-grade classmate George Nelson — it must have meant that the symphony was “modern.” After the intermission we heard Schubert’s “Great” Symphony in C Major, a work I had never heard before, but George knew it well. “This symphony begins with a solo horn,” he said. (Actually it turned out to be two in unison.) I was deeply impressed by the experience, and especially by the slow movement, but never imagined that I would write a book about this symphony a few years later (2011). Eventually I began to go […]
2023-12-18 00:00:00
Saint-Saëns, Honegger: Cello Concertos (Julian Lloyd Webber)
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)Cello Concerto in A minor op. 33Allegro appassionato op. 43 for cello and orchestraArthur Honegger (1892-1955)Cello ConcertoGabriel Fauré (1845-1924)Elégie, op. 24 for cello and orchestraVincent D'Indy (1851-1931)Lied, op. 19 for cello and orchestraJulian Lloyd Webber celloEnglish Chamber OrchestraYan Pascal TortelierPhilips 432 084-2 (1992)[flac, cue, log, scans]
2023-10-23 14:44:29
Short Notes II, October 2023
This Week in Classical Music: October 23, 2023. Short notes, II. Today is Ned Rorem’s 100th anniversary. Rorem died last year, just days short of his 99th birthday. He was a wonderful composer of songs and a whimsical writer. He spent almost a decade in France, where for a while he studied with Arthur Honegger (rather than Nadia Boulanger, as many American composers and pianists had done). In 1966 he published a book, Paris Diaries, based on his real diaries, full of gossip, gay stories, and a good read overall. In addition to about 500 art songs, some exceptionally good, he wrote two full-length operas, one of which, Our Town, based on a play by Thornton Wilder, was successfully staged in the US and abroad (he also wrote several smaller, one-act operas). In addition to that he composed three symphonies and a lot of piano music, including two concertos, but none […]
2023-09-30 08:32:00
What is essential is that you have to be passionate about the work: Canadian baritone Étienne Dupuis, Don Carlo in the Royal Opera's revival of La Forza del Destino on his clutch of Verdi roles
[…] some of Étienne's favourite pieces and a work by Rejean Coallier who is a friend of the string quartet, and he took a work for baritone and piano and worked it for baritone and string quartet. It all came together almost by accident, and then the record company heard them performing the programme and they were able to record it too.Apart from the recording of Meyerbeer's Dinorah with the Deutsche Oper Berlin on cpo and Honegger & Ibert's L'Aiglon on Decca, the rest of his discs he owes to Palazzetto Bru Zane, who explore works that have fallen by the wayside and become forgotten, some justified and some not as Étienne wryly adds. Halevy's La Reine de Chypre, which he recorded in 2018 [see my review], he was rather taken with, calling it beautiful and amazing. Like Verdi, Massenet wrote a considerable number of operas but we only hear four […]
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