\n<\/p>\n
Messiaen was a hobby ornithologist, and was charmed by Loriod\u2019s name, which sounded like \u201cloriot,\u201d or \u201coriole,\u201d one of the birds that would make its way into his \u201cCatalogue.\u201d And although they began to spend a lot of time together, on and offstage, their romance didn\u2019t start right away. Many have read Messiaen\u2019s trilogy of works inspired by the Tristan and Isolde myth \u2014 \u201cHarawi,\u201d \u201cTurangal\u00eela\u201d and \u201cCinq Rechants\u201d \u2014 as a sublimation of his feelings for Loriod. She loved him, but he was married to Claire Delbos, who was ill and in a nursing home; Loriod would drive Messiaen to visit his wife until Delbos died, in 1959.<\/p>\n
Two years later, Loriod and Messiaen were married in Paris. By then, she was the reigning interpreter of his piano music. She took up works he had written before they met, like the keyboard part in the \u201cQuartet for the End of Time,\u201d and those she had inspired, which are captured on the V\u00e9ga recordings.<\/p>\n
The box set includes an account of \u201cVisions,\u201d recorded with Messiaen, as well as of \u201cTurangal\u00eela,\u201d with Loriod on piano and her sister, Jeanne, playing the ondes Martenot<\/a>, an eerie, early electronic instrument. (For decades, it was almost a given that \u201cTurangal\u00eela\u201d performances with one sister would include the other.) Her recordings of \u201cVingts Regards\u201d and \u201cCatalogue\u201d remain authoritative reference documents, even as other pianists have added their own performances to the mix.<\/p>\n By the time Loriod turned 30, though, her repertoire included so much more: the major keyboard works of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart; standards by Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Debussy and Ravel; pathbreaking pieces by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern; and contemporary entries by Boulez, Andr\u00e9 Jolivet and Poulenc. When two pianists backed out of the French premiere of Bartok\u2019s Second Piano Concerto, deeming it too difficult, she took it up with just days to prepare.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n