Arthur Honegger's dramatic oratorio formed the opening gesture in what the London Symphony Orchestra called its Joan of Arc weekend, with Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light, written as a score to Carl Dreyer's film The Passion of Joan of Arc, the other main event.

Commissioned by the dancer and actress Ida Rubinstein and first performed in 1938, Honegger's work seems to have lost some of its shine over the years. Less a narrative than a consideration of Joan's life and death from the standpoint of her final days, the piece is eminently stageworthy, but was given here, as it was at its premiere, as a concert piece.

As Marina Warner pointed out in a programme note, Joan herself has been claimed as a figurehead by innumerable French groups from the extreme right to the extreme left. In Paul Claudel's text, she emerges as an innocent victim of the complex and subtle political forces ranged against her, and undoubtedly saintly. Honegger's score is distinctly uneven, with some passages sinking to the level of an undistinguished film score (the use of the ondes martenot is particularly crude), and others where the composer's imagination flies. In the trial scene, which Honegger sets as a grotesque scherzo, Paul Nilon's taut tenor caught the right note of venomous hysteria as Joan's chief tormentor, Porcus (alias Bishop Cauchon). The final section rises to genuine emotional power as Joan both fears and accepts her martyrdom.

The performance rose here, too, though elsewhere there was untidiness under Marin Alsop's baton and some tentative singing from the London Symphony Chorus. David Wilson-Johnson's Brother Dominic was good and solid, though in the other major spoken role of the saint herself, Amira Casar, while sincere and often touching, was too small-scale for the venue.