Concerto da camera

The Concerto da camera was the first work Honegger completed after his recovery from the serious heart attack he had suffered when on tour in the United States in July 1947. The commission had come from the American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, for whom had written his Third String Quartet ten years earlier and who had now approached him for a piece of chamber music featuring the cor anglais. Honegger decided at an early stage that it would be a chamber concerto and, perhaps because he felt that the cor anglais was not flexible enough a soloist to sustain a work in three movements, he chose to multiply the resources available to him by allying the cor anglais with a solo flute. Although he was unable to make a start on the new score until August 1948, it was finished by the end of October and it was first performed by Paul Sacher and the Collegium Musicum in Zurich six months later.

Broadly neo-classical in style, the Concerto da camera also has something of the baroque concerto grosso about it. The gracefully articulated harmonies on nine-part strings at the beginning act as a kind of ritornello, usefully informing a structure that follows no regular pattern. It seems at first that each of the solo instruments will have its own distinctive material, a characteristically pastoral melody for the cor anglais and a more playful theme for the virtuoso flute. But the flute immediately lends its lower register to extending the cor anglais melody and, after a return of the ritornello and the introduction of a bright new theme on the flute, the strings join the woodwind in a resourceful contrapuntal development of all three themes. The ritornello returns towards the end of the movement to accompany a poetic recall of all but the last of those themes.

The baroque element in the central Andante is the beginning of what is surely going to take shape as a passacaglia on the theme introduced in a measured tread and sombre colours by lower strings in the opening bars. While the movement actually turns out not to be a passacaglia by any formal definition, that theme is rarely absent, in whole or in part, for more than a few bars at a time. It briefly makes way for a contrastingly lyrical melody when it first appears on the flute and again when it is repeated by the cor anglais. But from then on the two main themes are developed together, the flute at first adopting a decorative role and then joining the cor anglais and strings in guiding the unadorned melodic lines through the contrapuntal texture. The closing bars sound as much like the end of a passacaglia as the opening bars had sounded like the beginning of one.

The Vivace last movement is more regular in shape than either of the first two. It is a scherzo with outer sections based on two themes which are toyed with at some length before they are introduced in their definitive form - a cheerful dance tune on violins and a comic turn on the flute, the grotesquely wide intervals of which were anticipated by the same instrument in the third theme of the first movement. The middle section features a legato melody sustained on the cor anglais against continuing rhythmic activity in the strings and decorative arabesques on the flute. Although the cor anglais recalls that melody as a counterpoint to the dance tune on the flute at the beginning of the reprise of the first section, it is the agility of the flute rather than the lyrical authority of the cor anglais that proves to be the more useful quality in the ensuing celebrations.