Hope: After oratorios, ballets, operas, art songs, and smaller orchestral works, Honegger turned – almost simultaneously with Darius Milhaud – at the beginning of the 1930s to the time-honored form of the symphony. Some ten years later, in the middle of the Second World War, his Second Symphony came into being. Catalyst  for the composition was a commission from the famous patron Paul Sacher, who conducted the premiere in Zurich on 18 May 1942, with the Basel Chamber Orchestra. Listening to the halting, gloomy beginning of this symphony for strings and  trumpet “ad libitum,” one can imagine the distress and oppression that arose as a  result of the war and the German occupation of Paris. Honegger succeeds here in  building up, over three movements, a tension of resignation and unexpected, late  hope, which instantly captivates the listener. 

 

Desire: Jacques Castérède’s Concertino  for trumpet, trombone, string orchestra, piano, and percussion was written in 1958  at the end of a Rome sojourn of several years. This is a work that combines the joy of playing and virtuosity with agreeable tonal charm. Two solo brass instruments  with brightly radiant sound – trumpet and trombone – contrast on the one hand with  the warm-toned string instruments, and with the piano and percussion instruments with their percussive qualities on the other. 

 

World Affairs: After Friedrich Nietzsche’s  Also sprach Zarathustra had become the perhaps most-discussed book of its time after its publication in the 1880s, Richard Strauss placed his tone poem, a work of no less impressive impact, alongside it. A new optimism, informed by thoughts of awakening, confidence, individual zest for life, but also by its excess of immoderateness and delusions of grandeur, is set to music here, entirely analogous to Nietzsche’s egomaniac self-assessment: “I pride myself on having brought the German language to perfection with this Zarathustra. After Luther and Goethe, there was still a third step to be taken.”