French label Timpani's Arthur Honegger: Les Mélodies contains literally everything extant that Honeggeroriginally composed for voice and piano; it excludes chansons that were written for motion pictures and a small number of vocal pieces cast in chamber settings and later busted down to voice and piano versions. It features Swiss mezzo-soprano Brigitte Balleys in the songs for high voice and French bass-baritone
Jean-François Gardeil in those for low voice; pianist
Billy Eidi provides accompaniment throughout the disc.
As in the case of
Francis Poulenc's art song output, the quality of Honegger's songs, and moreover their style, is consistent through the whole program; there are no bad songs, and such stylistic evolution as might be ascertained is so gradual as to be practically invisible. Honegger's earliest song, coincidentally the earliest Honegger composition available in print, dates from 1914, and the last, his harrowing setting of Psalm 130 "Mimaamaquin," from 1946. Outside of his psalm settings and some poems by sixteenth-century Gascon poet Saluste du Bartas, Honegger did not write music to texts to historical poetry, only to the work of living poets, many of whom he personally knew. The most famous of Honegger's chansons, the Six Poèmes d'Apollinaire, were all written while
Apollinaire himself still lived, the last of them within months of his death in 1917. This restriction, whether a conscious one or not, helped keep Honegger's output in song small, but of very high quality nonetheless. These works are generally graceful, restrained, harmonically rich, and well suited to the voice, although the pieces for low voice tend to lie in the baritone range. As "Mimaamaquin" was written for "extreme contralto" Madelaine Martinetti,
Gardeil sings it here, and the range of the piece is low even for him.
There are, unfortunately, no texts provided, and to provide them all would have made for both an unwieldy booklet and an economically top-heavy project in terms of payouts to publishers for reproduction rights. English versions of some of these poems -- particularly for those by
Apollinaire, Claudel, and
Cocteau -- are readily available in book form and some even on the web. Timpani wisely decided to devote the space instead to a useful and informative essay on this output by Honegger expert Harry Halbreich. The singing by both principals is excellent and in keeping with Honegger's rather reticent and calm approach to songwriting, the absolute opposite of the extroversion found in his orchestral music, and
Eidi's piano both provides support, yet remains transparent. Those with an interest in Honegger's art songs should be thankful for this, as it is hard to imagine how Timpani's Arthur Honegger: Les Mélodies could be better than it is.