While the programmes of Musikfest could never be considered overly conservative – they have a tendency to champion lesser-performed works over comfortable staples – every so often they will put on a concert that, by virtue of its unusual repertoire, takes one completely by surprise and demolishes any expectations one may have had on the way in.
This year that event came in the form of a guest appearance from Kent Nagano and the WDR Symphony Orchestra, whose world-première performance of Yvonne Loriod’s La Sainte Face was closer to a spiritual experience than a concert. Loriod’s ninety-minute epic for soprano, flute, harp and orchestra – which was completed in 1945, but lay dormant for some eighty years – was not merely one of the most singular pieces one might ever hope to hear, but a work that seemed to defy any preconceived notion of how twentieth-century music was supposed to sound.
La Sainte Face was, in fact, such an unknown quantity that it necessitated a late change in the evening’s original programme. The work, estimated at first to last around forty-five minutes, was initially sandwiched between Ein feste Burg, Alex Nante’s modern riff on Bach’s chorale, and Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony. The symmetry of that line-up – two works of Lutheran piety bookending a work of Catholic mysticism – was upended when the full scope of Loriod’s piece became known. The Mendelssohn was discarded and the programme fleshed out with solo-organ pieces by Jehan Alain and Jean-Claude Touche, two contemporaries of Loriod who were killed in the Second World War.
The result of these changes meant that Mr Nante’s piece became the odd one out. The most recent work on the programme – it had its première in Dresden in 2025 – Ein feste Burg was also by some measure the most traditional, scored for reasonably conventional forces and veering not too far from the tonality of the chorale on which it was based.
It opened with beautifully hushed high strings – so quiet they would have made the opening bars of the Lohengrin prelude sound bombastic – but soon blossomed into a more fulsome dialogue between strings and woodwinds. The pace remained solemn and the mood reverent until around half-way through, after which the piece developed a slightly more florid style as it built inevitably towards its full-orchestra climax. When the climax came, however, the piece did not end; the orchestra died away to reveal a solo viola holding onto a sustained note, which in turn introduced an introspective section that was, by far, the most intriguing part of the piece. Alas, it was only a coda: having hinted at a potential new direction, the piece drew instead to a quiet conclusion.
When the piece had ended, the orchestra left the stage and the remainder of the evening’s first part was devoted to music for solo organ. The first three pieces were by Jean-Claude Touche, an organist and composer who was killed at the age of 18 while working with the Red Cross during the liberation of Paris. The three pieces, a contemplative ‘Pastorale’, the quietly enigmatic ‘Élévations’, and a series of variations on Veni creator, all displayed affinities with the early-twentieth-century French organ school – the influence of Dupré, with whom Touche studied, was especially audible – but the performances of Henry Fairs on the Philharmonie’s Karl Schuke organ revealed a composer who had mastered fully the vocabulary of his chosen instrument. It remains impossible to know what might have happened if he had lived, but at least one of his classmates believed in his immense potential: Yvonne Loriod dedicated La Sainte Face in part to his memory.
Jehan Alain offers a more clear-cut ‘What if…’ scenario. More than a decade older than either Touche or Loriod, he was already well-established as a composer when he was shot by invading soldiers in 1940. The two Fantaisies for organ performed on this evening offered ample evidence of both his far-ranging imagination and his ability to place disparate ideas and approaches into reasonably compact structures. The second Fantaisie, especially, wove episodes of obvious contrast into a coherent whole in which urgency and contemplation seemed equally at home.
The relative calm of the evening’s first part, however, offered little preparation for what lay ahead. Yvonne Loriod’s La Sainte Face could be described as challenging in so far as it seemed to pose a subtle challenge to the very conventions of Western music. In 2026 – a time when adventurous listeners might be reasonably familiar with Boulez, Ligeti, Stockhausen and Feldman, and, though the miracle of the home stereo, might also have been exposed to the sounds of Balinese Gamelan or the Buddhist chants of Bhutan – it still sounded utterly alien; if it had been performed in 1945, when it was written, it might well have caused a riot, or changed the course of post-war music. Or both.
But perhaps because Loriod was writing with no real prospect of performance, perhaps because she was 21 and happy to flout convention, or perhaps because the appearance of the holy visage on the Shroud of Turin genuinely did send her into a kind of spiritual ecstasy, she managed to write a piece of singular vision and purpose that sounds like little else before or since.
Neither the structure and scale nor the performing resources of La Sainte Face were in any way conventional. It was scored for three soloists – soprano voice, flute and harp – and an orchestra with a reduced string section, an enlarged percussion group, a piano, two ondes martenots, and a woodwind ensemble that boasted seven flutes. Although the first part was broken into 14 distinct contemplations – each fixating on a particular aspect of the holy face (mouth, nose, hair, etc.), and each featuring very specific subgroupings of instruments – it played out as a single more-or-less unbroken movement of around 75 minutes. A shorter second part entitled ‘Meditation on the Lily’ served more as a coda to everything that had come before.
If the arrangement of the work was unusual, Loriod’s approach to timbral groupings was even more unexpected. Rather than creating a semblance of orchestral balance, she often pushed the instruments towards extremes of upper and lower register, and the three soloists – a high voice, a high woodwind, and a harp that often played on the uppermost strings – often found themselves pitted against onslaughts of equally high notes from the violins, glockenspiel and piano, or perched precariously above ominous clusters of cellos, basses and ondes martenot (sounding here far deeper and stranger than the crystalline glissandi that weave their way through Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony). While the solo parts remained uncontainably fluid, Loriod’s ability to fashion the supporting instruments into great static blocks or slow-moving clouds of sound yielded some of the work’s most captivating and unsettling moments (notably the terrifying low strings in section 8).
However, no description of the work’s structure or technical requirements can approach the sensation of experiencing this strange music unfold in a concert hall. Despite the detailed section titles, Loriod had dispensed entirely with the programmatic crutches of late romanticism and replaced them with a patient but relentless perpetual motion that, in some ways, appeared to prefigure the minimalist trends of the 1960s. Yet the work was too restless to lock itself into mere repetition; the wilful absence of familiar reference points, coupled with the seemingly eternal recurrence of disquieting sonic events, made for a piece that was both entrancingly hypnotic and uneasily intense.
Even in a work so full of unusual elements, the soprano part stood out: while Part Two offered a (relatively) conventional sung text, the whole of the first part was almost entirely wordless, as if the character of Echo from Ariadne had been given her own one-person opera. Yet perhaps due to the magnificent – and utterly heroic – performance of Sarah Aristidou, the vocal part emerged as one of the most prominent features of the evening, a near constant procession of gliding lines that sometimes echoed or countered the intricate flow of the flute, and at others seemed to rise above the orchestra’s treble clang in an expression of blissful transfiguration. At several points throughout Part One, the wordlessness gave way to the phrase ‘Mon père, pourquoi m’avez-vous abandonné’, often signalling a change in musical direction; for the most part, however, the soprano lines served as an integral part of the music’s distinctive texture.
The fact that Ms Aristidou was able to elucidate the continually shifting nuances of the part over such a great span of time was nothing short of astonishing; the fact that, after more than seventy minutes of near-constant vocal explorations she was still able to offer a lucid reading of the text of Part Two seemed almost superhuman.
The liquid flute lines of Wendy Vo Cong Tri or the delicate harp of Emily Hoile were almost as impressive, as indeed was the devotion of Kent Nagano to holding Loriod’s immense creation together. Mr Nagano, who was a friend of Loriod, was instrumental in rescuing the score of La Sainte Face from obscurity, and his understanding of the work’s superstructure gave a sense of focus to the development of its various episodes.
The commitment of the WDR Symphony Orchestra was also apparent in the countless arresting solo and ensemble passages: the occasional flourishes of solo-violin, the low strings, the group of auxiliary flutes and the percussion section all made notable contributions. However the cumulative effect of the piece came less from the individual musicians than the immense collective effort, and when the varied forces locked together – as they did most persuasively in section 11 – the results came remarkably close to the spiritual ecstasies that may have informed Loriod’s vision.
‘Uncompromising’ is an overused word when it comes to the description of vaguely challenging works of art, but in La Sainte Face one was confronted with a work so single-minded in its focus that it allowed itself no concession to external expectations. It was a work that demanded one listen differently, think differently, even experience time differently. And, as with all demanding artworks, it may take some time for La Sainte Face to find its public; just as one might find themselves sitting next to old-school punks at a Philip Glass concert, or might bond with a doom-metal fan over the organ works of César Franck, it may be that the work’s ideal audience lies somewhere outside the classical mainstream.
Whatever the case, La Sainte Face was a work that needed to be heard, and probably needs to be heard again several more times before one can hope to make sense of it. What is certain is that anyone who happened to be in the Philharmonie on this evening, whether they realised it or not, were witness to something extraordinary.
Post-script: In the absence of a commercial recording (which, one hopes, is forthcoming) a radio broadcast from the concert is available until October 2026 on the Berliner Festspiele Mediathek.
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