Paul Griffitths in the May 18, 2010, New York Times:
Yvonne Loriod, the French pianist whose musical exactitude and intensity inspired numerous masterpieces by her husband, the composer Olivier Messiaen, died on Monday at a retirement home in Saint-Denis, on the edge of Paris. She was 86.
[…]
In Ms. Loriod he [Messianen] found a musician who could provide avian qualities of agility and spectacle. “I have,” he once said, “an extraordinary, marvelous, inspired interpreter whose brilliant technique and playing — in turn powerful, light, moving and colored — suit my works exactly.”
Read the rest.
The “historic” and pretty funny video below is highly descriptive of what that story is all about.
