The door of Honegger’s Paris studio bore the message ‘Do not disturb’ in more than 50 languages. After the Second World War a heart attack added a certain bitterness to this serious outlook, epitomised in the bleakness of the Fifth Symphony. The Concerto da camera of 1948, on the other hand, has always been one of his most popular works, and here it sings and sparkles most engagingly, with flute and cor anglais soloists well forward and the string orchestra making the most of Honegger’s varied textures.
Thirty years earlier Honegger had just been finishing his studies at the Paris Conservatoire when he was commissioned to write music for an evening’s entertainment – as Harry Halbreich says in his authoritative insert-note, ‘neither ballet nor musical theatre, nor audiovisual poem, but something of a mixture of all three’. Le dit des jeux du monde caused one of those splendid Parisian scandals at its premiere in December 1918, with fisticuffs and exchanges of cards, but more on account of the incomprehensibility of the story-line, sets and costumes. Happily, here we can concentrate on Honegger’s 45-minute score, and an astonishing achievement it is for a student, albeit a mature one. Already the seriousness is in evidence, and already he is a master of the long, shapely tunes, the gritty harmonies and the teasing syntax we know from works like the Third Symphony. There are a few ugly tape cuts at the ends of movements (notably Nos 3 and 7), but otherwise this recording is wholly recommendable and helps explain why, a few months after failing his Conservatoire counterpoint exam, Honegger was asked to write songs, incidental music, an opera and three ballets.'