WDR Sinfonieorchester

A musical sensation: the highly expressive music of Yvonne Loriod is given a new lease of life. The brilliant pianist and legendary piano professor, born in Paris in 1924, was primarily known as the wife of Olivier Messiaen during her lifetime. The WDR Sinfonieorchester and Kent Nagano are presenting one of her numerous own compositions for orchestra for the very first time: La Sainte Face – The Saint’s Face for soprano and orchestra. The vocal part of this long-forgotten religiously influenced music will be undertaken by Sarah Aristidou. The work is preceded by Felix Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony and Ein feste Burg by Alex Nante premiered in 2025.

Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott is one of Martin Luther’s best-known hymns which became a symbol of ecclesiastical renewal: even Heinrich Heine was still describing the hymn as the “Marseillaise of the Reformation”. It was therefore a logical step for Felix Mendelssohn to take up this particular Luther hymn in his D minor Symphony “zur Feyer der Kirchenreformation”: the chorale also provides the basis for the Bach chorale setting BWV 301. This work in turn provided the point of departure for Alex Nante’s orchestral composition which also features Bach’s chorale So gehst du nun, mein Jesu, hin, den Tod für mich zu leiden: “As a Christian”, comments the Argentinian composer, “I felt the need to depict both aspects – the suffering and glory of Christ – in music since neither can exist without the other.”

Yvonne Loriod’s La Sainte Face presents a different aspect of faith. The composition for soprano and orchestra handwritten in black ink on 280 pages of the score consists of fifteen pieces, each with its very different instrumentation. As a 21-year-old student of Darius Milhaud, Loriod composed for an unorthodox scoring: solo soprano, eight flutes, woodwind and brass, a large range of percussion instruments, a small body of strings, two harps, piano, celesta and two ondes Martenot – an early electronic instrument. It is a musical sensation that the orchestral work composed back in 1945 is now experiencing its premiere 80 years later. Loriod’s compositional output is still in the process of being discovered – among others by Kent Nagano who has decisively influenced the Berlin music scene as a conductor. Nagano discovered a number of large-scale orchestral works by his former teacher in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris and is now saving them from oblivion with the WDR Sinfonieorchester.

Tickets: €15 - 69