CSR Symphony Orchestra (Bratislava)
Recorded November, 1987
Composed for the film in 1922
Album:
Honegger/Marco Polo Film Music Classics
Film:
www.tcm.com/tcm...
www.imdb.com/ti...
Note: This recording of the overture (the only surviving written piece of the score as explained in the liner notes) has been edited into the opening sequence of the film. The actual DVD release uses a new score by Robert Israel and I believe any earlier available release of the film was silent.
Liner Notes:
The only surviving piece from the score to Abel Gance's melodrama of 1922, La Roue, is Honegger's four-minute overture, scored for medium-sized orchestra. The rest of the music must be the subject of speculation and it is said that Honegger put together a score consisting of pieces of his own and music from the classical repertoire, perhaps including music he was writing at the time for the Pathé-Journal.
Apart from the lyrical section of the overture, later used in the first piece in the Suite derived from the score for Napoléon, there is a further point of interest in the following six bars of a rhythmic theme and twelve more bars of incompleted orchestrated sketches. A new theme is written out in full for clarinet and flute, and subsequently the first violins, in counterpoint with a bass motif, and figures among other thematic materials, orchestration and notes for further development. This coincides with the surging "whistling" triplet motif at bar 118 of Pacific 231, composed in 1923, suggesting that the inspiration for the work had arisen on a locomotive, while Honegger was working on La Roue, a conclusion supported by other elements in the sketches. With the approval of Arthur Hoérée, a bar has been added to link the two sections of the overture, avoiding what otherwise is an abrupt transition to the Pacific 231 motor pulsation motif.
It is not known whether Honegger conducted the first performance of La Roue himself, although we know that on that occasion the Cinépupitre was introduced into France, a device for synchronization of music and film similar to Carl Robert Blum's Rhytmonome.
The subject of La Roue is the railway, and this provided Honegger with scope for the musical application of his own passion for locomotives and model trains and no doubt gave the impulse for his masterpiece Pacific 231.
17 окт 2024
