Eighty Years Late, Yvonne Loriod Finally Gets Her Premiere

Eighty years after Yvonne Loriod wrote it, and eleven years after she died still known mostly as somebody else's wife, her orchestral song cycle La Sainte Face will finally be heard. Kent Nagano and the WDR Sinfonieorchester give the world premiere at Musikfest Berlin on September 5, with soprano Sarah Aristidou taking the vocal line, a piece nobody living had heard until Nagano found the manuscript himself.

Loriod wrote La Sainte Face in 1945, at 21, for a scoring nobody would choose on commercial grounds: solo soprano, eight flutes, a full brass and percussion complement, two harps, celesta, piano, a modest body of strings, and two ondes Martenot, the wavering electronic instrument that would later define the sound of her second husband's orchestral music. The manuscript runs 280 handwritten pages across fifteen movements. The festival's own program note describes her, at the time, as a student of Darius Milhaud, though her real formation over the two prior years had come from someone else.

That formation happened inside occupied Paris. Loriod's teachers at the Conservatoire had been deported by the Nazis in the war's early months; her harmony class reopened in May 1941 under a new instructor freshly released from a German prisoner of war camp, his fingers still swollen from the cold: Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen recognized what he had in the seventeen year old almost immediately. By early 1943 he'd written her a piano showcase, Visions de l'Amen, and premiered it with her at the keyboard on May 9, 1943, Paris still under German occupation, more than a year before Liberation. La Sainte Face, composed two years after that premiere and one year after the Germans left, was the work of a young composer who had just spent her entire conservatory education inside an occupied city, writing devotional music in a scoring nobody else was using.

She spent most of the rest of her life not writing. Loriod became one of the century's defining interpreters of Messiaen's piano music, and after their 1961 marriage largely folded her own compositional voice into his. Nagano has said he found La Sainte Face alongside a number of her other large-scale scores sitting unpublished and unperformed in the Bibliotheque nationale de France. He's now working through them with the WDR Sinfonieorchester one at a time, restoring a compositional catalogue that existed the entire time; it just needed someone to go and open the folder.

The September 5 program pairs La Sainte Face with Mendelssohn's Reformation Symphony and a 2025 companion piece by Argentine composer Alex Nante built from the same Bach chorale Mendelssohn used, a program constructed almost entirely from music that took decades or centuries to be heard the way its composer meant it.