Ansermet Conducts Honegger's 'Christmas Cantata'

It's surprising that I have maintained this blog for 17 years and never featured the Christmas Cantata (Une cantate de Noël) by the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger (1892-1955). It's a beautiful, ingenious, even profound work that was the composer's last.

Today we have a fine 1961 recording led by the eminent Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet (1883-1969), who has not appeared on the blog before.

The cantata is backed by Honegger's Symphony No. 2, an apt companion because both works depict a journey from the darkness into the light.

FYI: also below are links to another performance of the Honegger Symphony, coupled with Menotti's Violin Concerto, and to the latter composer's Amahl and the Night Visitors, in the famed first recording.

Arthur Honegger

Honegger's Christmas Cantata

Honegger's cantata was actually sketched in some detail more than a decade before it appeared. He had meant it to be part of a Passion Play that he was writing for the Swiss town of Selzach, to a libretto by Cäsar von Arx. However, the war, the composer's own illnesses and the librettist's 1949 death meant the full passion was never completed.

Among the fully sketched parts was the birth of Christ. When Paul Sacher commissioned a work from Honegger for the 25th anniversary of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, the composer decided to edit and orchestrate those sketches into the work we know as the Christmas Cantata. The premiere was in 1954.

In his book on Honegger's music, Harry Halbreich has written: "The composition of Une Cantate de Noël provided his last moments of creative happiness and, although the work was based on much older material, it carries nonetheless a symbolic significance in bringing his life to an end on a note of hope - that hope 'which is the strongest.'"

The work starts in darkness with somber organ tones that gradually lead to choral passages taken both from the liturgy and from carols both in French and German. The latter perhaps signify both multilingual Switzerland and peace among nations following the war.

Honegger makes remarkable use of "Stille Nacht." As the critic Alfred Frankenstein noted in High Fidelity: "[U]ntil you have heard 'Stille Nacht' manipulated by a Honegger, you haven't heard it at all."

Ernest Ansermet

The work is scored for baritone (here, Pierre Mollet), organ (Pierre Segond), choirs (Choirs of Pro Arte, French Swiss Radio and Television and the College of Villamont, directed by André Charlet) and L'Orchestra de la Suisse Romande conducted by Ansermet.

The recording comes from the Victoria Hall in Geneva, famed as a recording location. Even so, the cantata is murkier than ideal, probably because of the organ. I've tried to clarify the sound.

Symphony No. 2

As mentioned, Honegger's Symphony No. 2 is another journey from darkness into light, remarkable in its optimism considering it was written during the Second World War. The symphony is famed for its peroration, with a trumpet breaking through the turbulence and strikingly changing the mood of the work.

As with the Christmas Cantata, the symphony was commissioned by Paul Sacher for an anniversary of his Basel Chamber Orchestra - its tenth, in 1937. The work was not premiered, however, until 1942, and that came with Sacher conducting the Collegium Musicum of Zurich, another organization he founded.

Sacher (1906-99), who was wealthy, also commissioned works by Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Bohuslav Martinů, Frank Martin, Hans Werner Henze, Richard Strauss, Elliott Carter, Witold Lutosławski, Henri Dutilleux and Harrison Birtwistle, among others.

This is a very good performance in excellent sound.

LINK to Honegger's Christmas Cantata and Symphony No. 2

Another Honegger Performance with Menotti's Violin Concerto

Another strong reading of the Honegger second symphony, by the Boston Symphony and Charles Munch, is available here in newly remastered sound. Munch was a huge supporter of the composer

The coupling is Menotti's neglected but lovely Violin Concerto with soloist Tossy Spivakovsky.

The Honegger is from 1953, the Menotti from a year later.

The Classic Amahl and the Night Visitors

Appropriate to the season, I had a request for Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors, which I first uploaded a number of years ago. I've now remastered the files, which have always sounded great; now perhaps a bit better.

This is the brilliant premiere performance under the young Thomas Schippers. It was the first opera written for television, presented on Christmas Eve 1951. More information is here.