Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher sits in one of music's more puzzling blind spots — a work that does everything right and gets performed almost never. Composed in 1935 to a text by Paul Claudel, it reconstructs Joan of Arc's life in flashback across eleven episodes, with actors carrying the dramatic weight of Jeanne and Frère Dominique while solo singers and full chorus handle the sacred and the surreal. The structural gamble — mixing theatrical spoken word with concert oratorio — should feel awkward. It doesn't. It feels inevitable. The score is genuinely eclectic without being incoherent, which is harder than it sounds. Honegger weaves medieval modal writing and folk melody through Stravinskian neoclassicism and outright jazz, then throws three saxophones, multiple pianos, and the ondes Martenot into an orchestra that would otherwise read as conventionally large. The ondes Martenot's eerie wail — an electronic instrument that sounds like a cello crossed with a theremin — is used not for novelty but for the uncanny: it marks the boundary between Joan's physical world and her visions. Lukáš Vasilek and the Czech Philharmonic land every set piece. The trial-before-animals sequence — Joan examined by anthropomorphic beasts in a faux-Hollywood fanfare that tips into scabrous comedy — is exactly as unhinged as it needs to be. Kyle van Schoonhoven's Porcus, the pig-judge presiding over the tribunal, has genuine comedic bite. The card-game scene, where English and French nobility trade Joan's fate with the bored detachment of men who've already decided the outcome, is razor-edged. These aren't just passages that go well; they're passages that explain why the piece exists. Audrey Bonnet's Jeanne holds the whole thing together. She gives you both registers — the wide-eyed teenager and the religious zealot — without telegraphing the transition between them. The final movement, where Jeanne arrives at the recognition that martyrdom isn't defeat but an act of love, lands quietly rather than operatically. Sébastien Dutrieux's Frère Dominique guides her there with something that reads as genuine compassion rather than theological instruction. That restraint is the right call, and it's not easy to execute. The Prague Philharmonic Choir and Children's Choir are splendidly muscular throughout, and the engineering deserves mention: Jeanne's otherworldly interlocutors — the Virgin, Sainte Catherine, Sainte Marguerite — are captured in spine-tingling detail, spatially distinct from the earthly drama below them. Good recorded sound is table stakes, but this goes further; the sonic design reinforces the dramatic architecture. The honest question is whether neglect is ever truly corrected by a single recording, however good. Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher demands theatrical staging, bilingual audiences comfortable with Claudel's dense Catholic symbolism, and a willingness to sit with a work that refuses to resolve into any single genre. This recording can't fix the programming problem. What it can do — and does — is make the case so compellingly that programmers who pass on the piece have less excuse than they did before.
